


and if you're still breathing, you're the lucky ones

by AssumingMinds19



Series: in the place that you left [1]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: After Life Vaguely Inspired, Angst, Angst and Tragedy, Character Death, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Happy Ending, I disappear off the face of the earth, Kara Danvers is Supergirl, Mentions of Cancer, Met in a Graveyard AU, Moving On, What Is Wrong With ME, Widowed, and then I come back with this, mention of suicidal thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-30
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:20:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 35,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24251242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AssumingMinds19/pseuds/AssumingMinds19
Summary: “Your mom?”The question drew Lena’s attention back to the blonde woman, who was looking to Sam’s name with quirked eyebrow.“My wife."There it was, that look that always passed across people’s faces when they hear that her wife was dead. It should make her angry, it used to make her furious, but now it just made her feel tired.And broken.“Oh, sorry,” the woman replied softly, shifting a bit on her bench and looking back toward the headstone she’d been talking to. “Alex was my sister. I’m Kara.”“I’m Lena,” she answered, feeling tight and twisted inside.
Relationships: Alex Danvers & Kara Danvers, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor, Previous Lena Luthor/Sam Arias
Series: in the place that you left [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1969501
Comments: 292
Kudos: 1245





	1. Loss

**Author's Note:**

> Youth by Daughter inspired the title of this fic and basically sums it up. Give it a listen if you haven’t already

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shadows settle on the place that you left  
> Our minds are troubled by the emptiness  
> Destroy the middle, it's a waste of time  
> From the perfect start to the finish line

Sam always hated flowers. 

They’d always reminded her of funerals. An irony that wasn’t entirely lost on Lena when she’d stated in no uncertain terms that there were to be no flowers laid on the coffin. 

Because her wife hated flowers. 

Flowers didn’t mean death to Lena, though. Flowers meant life. Flowers meant hope and love and growth. Another reason that they had no place on her grave. Still, it was strange to show up to visit without bringing something. Something that said to strangers walking past, attending their own people, that this person, this dead person in the ground, someone still loves. 

Maybe actually having someone visiting would be a good sign of that instead, because it had been precisely five-hundred and ten days, thirteen hours and six minutes since she’d last been here. The day that they put Sam in the ground.

The day she’d buried her wife. 

It was a nice spot, not where Lena would have picked ordinarily, but the luxury of narrowing down the date of her death meant that Sam had been the one to make most of the arrangements herself. The one thing Lena wasn’t allowed to micromanage. There were too many other people for Lena’s liking. She would have put Sam on a hilltop someplace private, overlooking the ocean, not in the National City cemetery surrounded by strangers and only a tree and bench underneath it by way of a view. 

At least Sam keeping her own last name meant the chances of her headstone being defaced were limited. 

Lena wasn’t quite sure what she’d been expecting by coming today. She wasn’t even sure why she had come today. A combination of the move back to National City, the fact that Ruby had told her this morning that she didn’t want Lena to go to her hockey games anymore and the fact that today was the perfect weather for staying indoors, meant that Lena found her way to National City Cemetery. She didn’t really know what she planned to do once she got there. Dramatically stare at her headstone in silence for two minutes? Try not to freeze to death, even though the winter chill set her teeth on edge? Maybe she just wanted to sit down on the bench that Sam had been so determined to be in front of, under the tree and try to find a way to be less sad.

What she didn’t expect was someone else sitting on the bench, talking to a headstone about two metres from Sam’s. 

“…of course, you wouldn’t believe the trouble I managed to get myself in. Winn practically had a fit in the restaurant. He’s been a mood ever since… Well…”

Lena eyed the blonde woman as she walked up, hesitating in front of Sam’s headstone, unsure of her footing until the woman noticed presence and her words trailed off. Lena felt slightly guilty for interrupting. 

“Oh,” she breathed, looking askance at Lena with a wry smile. “I’m going mad.”

She looked sad, tired too. Lena glanced over towards the headstone the woman had been speaking to. Warm colour, simple, not inexpensive, but not gaudy. And new. Of course, that only meant that it hadn’t been there five hundred and ten days ago. 

Lena didn’t hold to well with conversation these days, but it felt awkward to just stand silently.

“You’re only mad if they start answering back,” Lena said, shoving her hands deep in her pockets, a ghost of a smile crossing her face. She was the last one to draw conclusions on the appropriate way to grieve.

“She does answer back.”

Lena surveyed the woman again. She had a kind face. The kind of face that made you want to smile and laugh, even if you didn’t want to. With her blonde curls and glasses and a buttoned-up, patterned shirt. She looked young too, like she had no business being in a graveyard having conversations with a headstone, more at home in a coffee shop or at least somewhere warm.

A nudge, something at the back of her mind pushed her.

“What’s she say?”

The blonde woman shrugged, a soft smile gracing her face and lighting her eyes. 

“Depends on what I ask her.”

It was easier to pretend that things were normal if she kept busy. Not that she hadn’t been busy lately anyway. Moving an entire company to the west coast tended to do that, on top of relearning how to talk to a teenage stepdaughter. 

Lena looked back at Sam’s headstone, taking it in for the first time and tracing the letters of her name with her eyes. Sam had designed it too. She wanted something simple, just her name.

“Your mom?”

The question drew Lena’s attention back to the blonde woman, who was looking to Sam’s headstone with a quirked eyebrow. 

She didn’t know what to feel at the question. It wasn’t like she had to answer, or even if she did, she could lie. Lena felt the urge to do so for a brief second, because often it was easier to pretend like she wasn’t what she was at the age of twenty-seven. But the truth of the matter was, Lena didn’t even know where her mother was buried, Lillian had never told her. And lying about who Sam was to her, even to a total stranger… well, that was just against the very fibre of her being. 

“My wife.”

There it was, that look that always passed across people’s faces when they hear that her wife was dead. It should make her angry, it used to make her furious, but now it just made her feel tired. 

And broken. 

“Oh, sorry,” the woman replied softly, shifting a bit on her bench and looking back toward the headstone she’d been talking to. “Alex was my sister. I’m Kara.”

For some reason that made Lex’s face flash in her mind. She imagined him, sitting in a cell, mad and screaming at the world. Thinking it was unfair.

As if life was unfair for _him_.

“I’m Lena,” she answered, feeling tight and twisted inside. 

Kara, which was a nice enough name, smiled at her introduction and a few seconds lingered in silence when they both looked back to their own family’s headstones. Lena let herself sit in the silence of the cold air for a few more quiet seconds, wondering if she’d visited long enough now not to come back for at least a year when Kara’s voice cut through her thoughts. 

“She seems nice, doesn’t she?”

Lena blinked, looking over and realised that Kara was once again talking to her sister’s headstone. 

About her.

Unsure what to do, or if she was interrupting again, Lena spoke.

“Does she agree with you?” Gesturing towards the headstone with a wave. 

Kara laughed, empty enough to be fake. An echo that Lena could recognise anywhere now. 

“It’s a toss-up,” Kara replied. “Alex liked to disagree with most of the stuff I thought and did. We argued about everything all the time.”

Without warning, Kara burst into tears, alarming Lena enough to make her regret coming today and feel guilty for feeling that way all at once. Lena was terrible with tears at the best of times. Unlike Sam, who burst into tears every time so much as a sad movie trailer played on the TV, Lena wasn’t a crier. She hadn’t cried in… so long she couldn’t really remember. She hadn’t cried at the funeral. 

She couldn’t.

Lena didn’t really know what to do, so she just stood locked in place, staring at a stranger and feel feeble. Kara seemed to pick up on her burning desire to flee and hastily mopped her eyes on her sleeve. 

“Crying, again,” she sniffed. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologise for crying,” Lena said weakly. “Please.”

Kara nodded jerkily at her words.

“Sorry.”

“There you go again,” Lena inched forward warily. “Apologising.”

“My sister used to get on my case about it too,” Kara said with a watery smile. “She’d probably punch me if she saw me now.”

Lena took a step toward the other woman, hovering between a desire to give comfort and her innate inability to do so successfully.

“Well, that’s what this is all for apparently,” she said instead, giving honesty to her thoughts and gesturing across the cemetery, a sea of headstones. “Grieving and all that. Closure.”

Lena hated that word. As far as she was concerned, closure wasn’t really in the cards for her. It never had been. Not when her mother died. Not when her father did. Not when Lillian rejected her. Not when her brother went mad and especially not now that her wife was dead too. Still, it was supposed to inspire comfort. At least that’s what Sam told her before she died.

“Tuesday lunchtimes were our thing,” Kara began, rather hoarsely, her face wracked with so much raw grief, Lena felt it mingle with her own. “Every week, no matter what.”

Lena took a solider step forward now, indicating the space on the bench next to Kara. 

“You mind if I?” She questioned.

Kara’s eyes widened, seemingly stunned that anybody would voluntarily want to sit next to someone in her state, but she scooted even further along the bench regardless, making more space.

“No, not at all. Please. Stops me rambling and all that.”

Lena settled beside her, bundling herself a bit tighter in her thick coat and let out a sigh. 

“You’re not rambling,” she breathed out. “You’re talking.”

Kara choked on her next breath, her eyes puffy and red. 

“And crying.”

Lena stared at her for a brief beat, before reaching towards and rummaging through her purse.

“Here,” she said, handing her a packet of tissues which Kara grabbed eagerly.

“At least you remembered to bring tissues to the cemetery.”

At the loud, unabashedly disgusting sound of Kara blowing her nose and cleaning her face finished, Lena gave her a reserved smile.

“Well, that’s less grieving 101 and more of a parenting staple,” she explained once Kara handed the now half-empty packet back. “I also have a first aid kit, wipes and Advil if you need them.”

“You’ve got a kid?” Kara said, surprise evident in her voice. Another thing that Lena was used to now when people found out about Ruby. 

She still wondered how Sam had done it all those years before they met. 

“Yeah,” Lena continued, her smile a little easier now. “A daughter. She just turned fifteen.”

That had been a fun birthday, or rather lack of. Lena had done her best, but she wasn’t Sam. Sam had been the one who made the cake and picked the spot they’d go on the day trip to. She was the one who’d somehow known the perfect gift to get and knew all the fun stories because she had been there for every minute of Ruby’s life. 

This year, Ruby decided she wanted the same thing Lena always wanted on her birthday. 

To do absolutely nothing. 

Lena wasn’t sure if she’d done the right thing or not by going along with it. 

“Wow,” Kara replied with wide eyes. “I don’t mean to be rude, but you really don’t look old enough to have a teenage daughter. I mean that in the best way! Foot in mouth disease.”

There was no judgement in Kara’s eyes or voice, so it was clear enough that she wasn’t harbouring shitty opinions about teenage motherhood, though the flush that crept up her neck and cheeks clearly meant she was embarrassed by what she had said. Lena opened her mouth to reply, then hesitated.

“She’s… adopted.”

Technically correct, but not the whole truth. 

Kara didn’t seem to pick up on her hesitation, another smile gracing her face. 

“Oh, that’s cool,” she answered. “I’m adopted too. Late. Just turned thirteen when it happened. Couldn’t have asked for a better family then the Danvers though.” 

Her voice seemed to crunch once more.

“Or a better sister.”

Kara trailed off after that, her eyes zoning out as she stared at her sister’s headstone once more. Lena looked to Sam’s name too, trying to find some of the comfort she was supposedly supposed to feel sitting here, but all she had in her heart was numb and weighted. It wasn’t like her wife was really here, just lying in a box in the cold ground. All this place was to her was a headstone and a tree and a bench. 

At least on a cliff at the ocean, it would have been a beautiful view. 

“I lost my wife early last year,” Lena suddenly said, breaking the silence first. “Still not over it, but there’s nothing special about that.” 

When they’d first found out, Lena didn’t believe it. All she could do was sit next to Sam, clutching her hand as the doctor droned at them. Later that night, her breath had come in searing gasps, still not believing it. Because if out of the two of them, Sam wasn’t the one that cancer was supposed to happen to. Out of the two of them, Sam wasn’t the one who was supposed to leave first. 

“People you love die, life goes on,” she said flatly. “It’s not as good though, but there you go.”

There was a burn in the back of her throat, her own words felt like acid on her tongue. 

“I’m not the best at comfort.”

Kara shrugged beside her.

“I think you’re ok,” she said in a quiet voice, gentle and sympathetic in a way that set Lena’s teeth on edge. “Other people are… Well. You seem like a nice person.”

At that, Lena grinned, rolling her head towards Kara and arching an eyebrow.

“Because I carry tissues?”

Kara made a funny sound, halfway between a sob and a laugh. 

“Well, I didn’t want to say it was the first-aid kit.”

Lena’s centre shifted for what felt like the first time in years, suddenly feeling more solid. More real. Relaxing as much as she could on the cold bench, Lena recrossed her arms briskly against the chill.

“I’m sorry if I interrupted your conversation before.”

Kara seemed to ease in herself too, scratching the back of her neck and not looking at all frozen enough for Lena’s petty liking. 

“No, you just saved me recounting a truly awful dinner I had on the weekend with my friends.”

Friends. Lena can’t remember the last time she had one friend, let alone the plural.

“Bad food?”

“No,” Kara shook her head. “But one of my friends has a lot of food sensitivities. I don’t know why he thought Ethiopian was a good choice, but I guess he thought since I’d never been before it might tempt me out of my apartment. All my friends think I’m starting to become a hermit. It’s not that I don’t want to see them, I just…”

Lena understood that. Because even though she’d never had well-meaning friends that tried to drag her out of her grief, she could certainly appreciate the desire to be left alone in it. 

“Don’t particularly want to see them,” Lena finished for her. 

Kara seemed to disappear inside her own mind for a minute, eyes drawing away from Lena and back to the grave.

“They loved her too,” she finally said. “I know that. And they love me. But it’s just… different. I don’t feel ready for it. Going out. It’s not like things can go back to the way they were anyway.”

Depression sucked, Lena couldn’t deny that. The person you loved being dead sucked more. 

“It’s good, though,” Lena replied softly. “To have people who care about you. Who wants to be there for you. But it’s also a pain in the ass.”

“It’s a total pain in the ass,” Kara exhaled, her voice strung with unexplored tension. “I mean, can’t I just be let alone to self-implode?”

“Personally, I loved my self-imploding phase,” Lena answered dryly. “Really went down well with a bottle of cabernet.”

Kara threw her head backed and laughed. Shattering the air with the sound and for half a second, something warm swelled in Lena’s chest at the sound. Kara’s laughter turned into more of a strangled groan quickly though, leaning forward, she braced her head in her hands, and Lena saw that tears were once again crawling down her cheeks. 

“I’d kill for a glass of wine right now,” she whispered. “Me, Alex, on my couch with a glass of wine talking about everything. Well, when I say talking, I was doing most of the talking. She was doing the listening. If you don’t mind me asking-“

“Cancer,” Lena said automatically, deadly, like a bullet between the eyes.

“Oh… no…” Kara stuttered out, looking slightly horrified. “I wasn’t going to…”

Lena felt like shit for assuming, shittier for making this kind stranger squirm with the knowledge of it.

“Sorry,” Lena said quickly. “It’s just, everyone I know… knows, and you’re the first person I’ve talked to for longer than five minutes I’ve met the doesn’t and I just… Wanted to say it.”

Silence and stillness weren’t unbearable anymore, old friends instead, but actually talking to an adult out loud about Sam was… disconcerting.

“What did you want to ask?”

Kara’s mouth gapped like a fish for a second, before another flush filled her cheeks. 

“I just wondered if you’d like to get a drink sometime,” she replied, her eyes immediately filling with more horror. 

“Not like that!” She half-shouted. “I mean, just that everyone I know is… You’re… You seem to be… Sorry.”

Lena took in the strange rambling mess before her with sympathy. She usually didn’t hold much with people that couldn’t say what they mean and wanted and say it directly, but she could appreciate what Kara was trying to do. Reach out through the loneliness for a lifeline. A connection with someone, for something that she obviously wasn’t getting from her friends. But while Lena could appreciate that, she couldn’t be that anyone right now. She even struggled to be that for Ruby. 

But something in the way Kara was looking after her, that hint of deep sweetness in her blue eyes that reminded Lena of Sam, stopped her for cutting off the friendship offer at the knees entirely.

“Coping mechanisms?” Lena demanded more than asked.

Kara blinked at her.

“Sorry?”

“Coping mechanisms,” Lena repeated. “You got any?”

Kara tensed in her seat, a strange look passing across her face before she answered in a rush.

“Sleeping, self-isolation, obsessively staring at photos of my sister and crying, apologising for myself constantly, being angry with the world,” she listed. “You?”

“Baking, oddly enough. Trying to micromanage my daughter’s life without ruining it. And yes, drinking. Nothing quite hits the spot as drinking wine in bed.”

Apart from the red wine stained ring on her bedside table that was. 

“Sounds undeniably healthy,” Kara said with a grin, full of morbid humour.

“Absolutely,” Lena continued. “Making ourselves sick with it all.”

“We could be peculiar friends,” Kara grinned wider. “Joined by self-pity, bitterness and vomit.”

Lena shrugged, but a smile played on her lips too. 

“Beats grief counselling.”

“Ha!” Kara exclaimed. “I’ll be sure to tell my shrink that. He’s trying to get me to be more zen.”

Lena’s face pinched and gave Kara a look a mock-disgust at the word.

“Zen?” She questioned. “I don’t think I’d know how to be zen. Don’t think I’d want to be.”

“No, it’s great,” Kara rushed, her hand touching Lena’s elbow lightly in her excitement. “You just get to be all ‘inner-peace’ like and when you hit like, level ten zen, you get to lecture everyone around you about yoga.”

Lena’s couldn’t reply, she couldn’t even breathe, all she could do was stare at the fingers still touching her arm, even through the thickness of her clothes feeling the heat. A flood of memories threatened to burst through her mind like a damn, alongside a rush of weird and complicated guilt. 

But then, Kara’s fingers weren’t on her arm anymore. And she could breathe. 

“Well,” she managed, clearing her throat. “Who wouldn’t want that?”

Looking back up into Kara’s eyes, she saw a stir of something that was more than sympathy in her eyes. 

Understanding.

“Who indeed.”

They didn’t exchange numbers.

* * *

Lena found herself drawn back to the cemetery. Back to Sam. She’d didn’t plan for it to be a Tuesday, nor for it to be lunchtime when she did, but it was, and there she was. Walking towards that same tree and bench and feeling something strange when she saw the back of a blonde head on it.

Kara was reading today, no scintillating conversations, and she didn’t look as tired, and when she heard the sound of Lena walking towards her, she looked up with a smile that had Lena’s feet moving slightly faster to get there. 

Without pause, as if it hadn’t just been two weeks, and they still weren’t perfect strangers, Kara dived into the conversation before Lena had even had a chance to sit. 

“So, me being zen didn’t completely work out.”

“No?” Lena settled on the bench.

“I went along to this meditation thing with my friend,” Kara explained, closing her book but leaving her finger in place between the folded pages. “But the instructor was so annoying! I ended up shouting at him and storming out.”

Lena had a hard time picturing the wavy-haired blonde next to her, wearing pink polka-dot pants, shouting but looks could be deceiving. She’d certainly been prone to shouting on occasion. 

“How was he annoying?”

Kara let out a heavy sigh.

“In every way,” she groaned, gesturing animatedly. “Just slurping tea and sniffing. And doing that thing with his nose when he didn’t want to blow it. Snorting it back up.”

“What did you shout?” Lena questioned appreciatively.

Kara looked slightly guilty, but a hint of mischief in her eyes battled with it. 

“I think I called him a snort-curdler. Yeah.”

“Oh dear,” Lena snorted rather unflatteringly, covering her mouth immediately at the sound, but unable to contain her amusement. To her credit, Kara didn’t seem dissuaded, her grin actually widened.

“Then I went home, got drunk and watched videos of Alex on her last birthday.”

Lena thought back to her apathetic phases, lying on the bed and staring at the ceiling for hours in silence. She’d systematically removed every photo of Sam from their bedroom, between the move to Metropolis and then the move back most of the pictures in the apartment had been designated to areas Ruby frequented full stop. Lena doubted she’d have the courage to watch old videos. 

“Well,” Lena breathed, glancing at Sam’s name in stone. “That’s not too terrible.”

“Except I never get drunk,” Kara explained. “So now I’ve got a hangover, and I’ve probably got all my friends on ‘Kara; Code Red’.”

Lena looked over at Kara disbelievingly.

“Do I even want to know?”

“It involves a pineapple, a trip to the zoo and bad hair dye.”

Lena blinked, unable to even fathom the ridiculousness that story hinted at. 

“Logically, how could it not involve a pineapple,” she answered breezily after a pause.

Kara eyed her suspiciously before waving away the comment.

“My point is, they already think I’ve lost my marbles and this hasn’t helped,” she continued, her fingers flexing on her knee. “Total personality shift. Before I’d have been the first one ready to try out meditation. Alex was always the one with the hair-trigger temper about this stuff, but God love her if she didn’t do it for me.”

Lena supposed it must be some long-standing tradition amongst the bereaved to fluctuate wildly between moods when talking about the dead. Kara’s face had immediately shifted from a grin to shattered.

“It’s like I’m just morphing into a shittier version of my sister’s personality,” Kara continued in a dark tone. “Like Alex’s bad moods mixed with _my_ hair-braininess, wearing a trench coat in a dark alley.”

Lena inclined her head at the description.

“That was… oddly specific,” she muttered, taking a breath and bracing herself to dole out advice. “Though I really wouldn’t worry about it too much. After Sam died, I started doing things that were just so not me. Like I was possessed by her spirit to make me do the dishes myself.”

So many memories and nagging, lingering arguments about unimportant things that were so easily solved. Why did she never do the dishes before? Probably because she was crap at domesticity, never having to hold a broom before in her life before she met Sam.

“Dishes are a bit different to treating your friends like crap.”

Yanked from her own spiralling thoughts abruptly by Kara’s words, Lena looked over the other woman’s now slumped figure. 

So despondent. 

“Hey,” she tried softly, hesitantly. “We grieve. People grieve.”

Kara let out a shuddered breath, taking a few minutes of silence before she looked to Lena with red-rimmed eyes. 

“How’d you do it?” Her voice grated out of her throat like it had been run over by gravel. “You seem so… together.”

Lena resisted the urge to laugh at the suggestion, but truthfully she wasn’t surprised. The Luthor family training kicked in, dropping cold and blank facades as if their very lives depended on it. Except for `Lex, of course. Passive-Aggressiveness kicked to the curb in favour of insanity and plans for world domination. 

“I’m a better actor then you maybe,” Lena replied finally, feeling brittle.

Kara watched her intently, her eyes intense.

“Seriously.”

Lena would like to smile and make no answer. It was her usual response if someone asked how she was. Most people didn’t really care anyway, they just wanted to ask out of obligation, or worse, curiosity. Most worse, most honestly of all, just to see if the youngest and newest Luthor CEO was ready to crack. Vultures prepared to sweep in and pick at the bones. But Kara wasn’t looking at her the way most people did when they asked, and a sweeping desire filled Lena’s heart, to be honest. 

“When Sam died, I wanted to kill myself,” she rattled out gruffly. “And when I couldn’t, didn’t, I thought if I’m going to do this carrying on living thing, it’s going to be on my terms. I’m going to do what I want, when I want, and I’ve always got suicide to fall back on.”

The lid of her own particular brand of crazy now, Lena waited for some sort of response from Kara. A look of horror, maybe. Running away screaming, definitely. She didn’t except Kara’s reply.

“Good to have a backup.”

Lena softened, smiling to herself for a second.

“At first I thought it was amazing,” she explained. “I can do anything, who cares? What’s the worse that can happen, nothing too bad because I can always kill myself, you know? But then I realised you can’t not care about things you actually do care about. You can’t fool yourself, and even though I’m in pain, it’s worth sticking around to try and make my corner of the universe better. For Ruby, you know.”

Even if she was floundering on that front. 

“It’s not all about me,” Lena whispered, looking at Kara with a shrug. “That’s all there is. Happiness is so amazing, it doesn’t really matter if it’s mine or not.”

It was such a lovely day. Cold, but at least the sun was out, crisp through the chill. Lena always wondered about everything, she had her whole life, but the desire deep in herself to be warm was inbuilt. 

Warm, again. Sam had been so warm.

“Good people,” Kara’s voice cut through lightly. “Do good things for other people. And I think you’re good, Lena. Smart, funny, kind.”

Kara’s eyes were kind, soft and most importantly, to Lena, honest. Honest enough that Lena knew that she believed what she was saying. Lena stared at her for a while, lost in the idea of warmth before that nudge in her mind nudged as it was want to do, along with guilt. Breaking the exchanged stare, Lena rolled her eyes and shook off the words.

“You forgot, _unbelievably_ sexy.”

It was a throwaway line. Ridiculous. Something she would have said to Sam, but still, it made Kara grin.

“Nah,” she answered with a thoroughly serene expression on her face. “I just didn’t want to be too obvious.”

* * *

“I feel.. panicked,” Kara rattled, on the verge of tears. “All the time. Like I’m going to do the wrong thing. So… I don’t do anything. And that’s why I think I’m going to blow it with Cat tomorrow, but..”

Her words trailed off, and she took a sip of her coffee. 

Lena watched her with concern, worried for all the things Kara had told her during their less and less infrequent meetings on Tuesdays on their bench. Like that when her sister had died, Kara hadn’t been able to leave her apartment for three weeks. The fact that she’d lost her dream job and had been told by her more mentor then boss that she was only allowed to reapply when she got her shit together. The fact that `Kara had to accept a job at a community newspaper and after four months had finally had enough and was interviewing again tomorrow. 

“Concentrate on getting better,” Lena finally said simply. “Everything else can wait.”

It’s something that Sam would have said, because Sam would have been so much better at comfort then she was. Still, she thought she was doing ok for never having a proper friend before. At least, Kara always seemed to be happy if she turned up on a Tuesday. 

Especially if she brought coffee.

“I’m not sure I’m worth waiting for,” Kara admitted. “I’m embarrassed…that I’m acting the way that I am.”

Like the public meltdowns, screaming at her friends, throwing the microwave in the garbage chute when it didn’t heat fast enough. Personally, Lena thought those were pretty minor incidents considering the last time she felt close to falling to pieces she scrapped her plan to merge with Lord Tech when Maxwell asked her to dinner.

Kara’s apparent overreactions were less expensive.

“Whatever gets you better.”

Kara chuckled weakly at Lena’s reply.

“Yeah, I’m not better, but I’m not going to stick my head in the oven.”

“I doubt you know where the oven is.”

Kara laughed, but Lena had heard the stories about Kara’s attempts at cooking.

“Good one!”

Lena was relieved to hear her say that. Though if the past few months had taught her anything, it was that Kara’s sense of humour was as black as her own.

“You’re in pain,” Lena answered gently.

Not an excuse, an explanation.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m embarrassed about really.” Something twisted on Kara’s face. “Dying of cancer, that’s being in pain. Actual pain. I felt sorry for myself. I still do. But I’ve realised that death will come soon enough and there’s nothing to fear about it. No feelings to worry about, not mine anyway. Just peace and quiet.” 

Lena thought about Sam. All the nights in the hospital when she could barely even breathe. She wondered if Sam would rather her time over faster to skip that hell.

"I am trying to work out if there’s a way I can still carry on annoying people, after I die, but I haven’t cracked it yet,” Kara grinned through the tears in her eyes. “But I’ll just have to make the most of that one while I’m alive.”

Lena’s mind jerked back again, watching Kara watch her.

“It’s a hobby.”

“Yeah,” Kara nodded. “Just to asses, though. I’m trying to be nice to the people who were nice to me at least. I’ve realised, remembered, that everyone’s struggling and I feel that I should help the people, who helped me. My friends.”

Kara’s voice petered out at that, her eyes sliding back to her sister’s headstone the way they always did when she had a few seconds of no distraction. Lena knew it was because Kara wished she could understand what Alex thought about whatever she just said. What her opinion was, what she’d think, how she’d react. Without her sister, Kara felt like she was walking through life without a limb. 

“That’s good. It’s good to be good. It’s good to help. 

Lena was a poor replacement, but still, Kara smiled.

* * *

“How are you?”

Kara shrugged, leaning into Lena’s space more then she really wanted. But when someone’s in pieces beside you, invasion of your physical and emotional space falls down the list of things you didn’t want today.

“Yeah, you know.”

Lena made a face.

“What’s that mean?”

Kara sighed, running a hand down her face, pinching the bridge of her nose, before letting it fall on her lap. 

“I was trying to be all suave and not, you know, burden you with my troubles.”

Lena looked upwards, the slight rustling of leaves disturbing her attention. The first of the spring leaves had returned to the tree. Green shoots sprouting, delicate and wavering in the light wind. Surprising, she hadn’t noticed it before.

“Well, us suave people love to gossip,” Lena answered breezily. “So spill the beans.”

Kara leaned back on the bench, straightening her spine and turning even more into Lena's space. So close her knee brushed Lena’s briefly. 

“I’m the same really,” Kara huffed exhaustively. “I’m still a bit crazy, trying hard to care about stuff. And then today, we find out that the owner of the paper is selling up and we’ll all lose our jobs.”

So she hadn’t gotten her old job back. Lena should have asked. 

“Not the bad bit though, I was fine with that,” Kara waved off. “Then my friend starts crying cause it’s the only job she’s ever liked and so I’ve got to try and save it, for her sake." 

Letting out a mirthless laugh, Kara then groaned as if even contemplating the effort that would take more out of her then it was worth. Lena immediately resolved the make a call tonight and buy the paper herself. 

“Just think,” Kara’s strained. “If you’d killed yourself, you’d have missed all this. Sorry, an absolutely awful joke to make.”

Lena couldn’t help but laugh, despite Kara’s mortified expression.

“Not at all,” she assured. “You made me smile. Morbid humour does that.”

* * *

A horrible week. One of the worst she’d had in a while. Between a parent-teacher conference which revealed Ruby was in a play she hadn’t told Lena about, the disruption in her production line for her new alien image inducer devices and Lillian calling to lecture her on how she was a stain to the family name, Lena definitely wasn’t feeling like she had much to offer anyone at the moment. 

“I am, and always will be, useless without her.”

The breath caught in her lungs and a burning grew behind her eyes, she couldn’t even react appropriately when she felt the soft touch of Kara’s fingers on the back of her clenched fist, tracing over the skin until she released the tension and allowed Kara to thread her fingers with her’s. 

Kara squeezed her hand. 

“Don’t say that,” she whispered. “You’re not useless.”

Lena tried to stop herself from shaking, trying to focus on their clenched hands as some sort of lifeline. A way to ground herself to reality and stop herself from completely falling to pieces. 

“It’s not that I couldn’t do anything without her,” Lena said emptily. “It’s just that I didn’t want to. It was no fun. I’d come home, she’d be in the kitchen, cooking, chopping stuff, helping Ruby with her homework, asking me about my day, giving me advice on stuff. And if she went, ‘oh pass the salt’, I’d go, ‘fuck me, do I have to do everything around here’.” 

Lena tried to smile at the memories, but it came out wobbly instead. Her voice cracking over the words and the pain they inspired. So many things she tried not to think about anymore, so much that she had lost.

“I miss her so much,” she admitted with a shudder, feeling relieved and revolted with herself for saying it out loud.

Closing her eyes, she tried to re-inflate her insides with something other than loneliness. 

“Have you ever thought about having a relationship?” She questioned, eyes opening. “Boyfriend, girlfriend?”

Kara didn’t answer quickly, Lena could feel her intense stare, knowing that she wasn’t fooling her trying to change the subject to something new. Still, Kara must have decided it was best to let it go, even if she didn’t let go of Lena’s hand.

“You know, I want what you had,” she answered tentatively. “Marriage, kids. I had a boyfriend for a minute there. He wasn’t…. well, Alex never liked him. He left, then he came back married, and it all got bizarre. Ended up liking his wife more than him, and it turned out Alex was right. Not actually straight after all.” 

She didn’t sound too happy about it, but Lena chalked that up to having more to do with the absence of her sister. Lena managed to gather herself enough to look at Kara now, taking in her confusion, tenseness and grief that Lena knew too well. 

This time, it was Lena that squeezed their joined hands. 

“There is this one girl that I kind of know through work,” Kara continued with a thin smile. “She’s pretty cute.”

She didn’t sound that enthusiastic, but Lena wasn’t going to mention it. 

“Feeling like testing the waters?”

Kara shrugged, sighed and pulled her hand out of Lena’s and back towards herself. 

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

Lena felt a tendril of sympathy, mixed with an increased sense of guilt and something else. Something greedy. 

She flexed her fingers, folding them back into her own lap. 

“Well, whatever you do… It’ll be ok.”

* * *

Kara ate disgustingly, but Lena wasn’t afraid to admit that it captured her attention in a sort of mesmerising way. For some insane reason, the three cheeseburgers that she had shoved into her mouth managed to fit, leaving Lena wondering about her own understanding of the laws of physics. Still, Kara managed to swallow it all with a grimace that had less to do with the amount she’d eaten and more to do with what she had just told Lena before she shoved half a cow in her mouth. 

“Why would you be embarrassed about being honest and saying something nice?” Lena said, daintily and pointedly picking at her own salad with her fork. “She should be flattered.”

Kara gave the Big Belly Burger bag a shake, the lack of loose fries evidentially of great disappointment to her judging by her mournful expression. 

“I think she was scared,” she sighed distractedly. “I’m obviously not her type.”

Lena eyed Kara briefly, wondering if the extra-large thick shake she’d just drunk had caused temporary brain damage. Kara wasn’t the type to fish for compliments, or reassurances, but in the time that Lena had known her, she had given off the distinct impression that she was astoundingly unaware of her own beauty. 

Lena’s mind drifted for a brief second, eyes tracing the slope of Kara’s cheek and her sharp jawline, before the thoughts dropped and twisted in her gut. 

“Someone just got there first, but you didn’t do anything wrong,” Lena murmured, looking away. “You showed your feelings. That’s good. I wished I’d shown my feelings more, with Sam.” 

There she went again, the way she always did. Thoughts back to Sam like a lightning rod.

“Sometimes I’d be embarrassed to hold hands in public,” she admitted, the way she admitted everything she remembered to Kara. “Or if we were on the phone and there were people around, she’d always say ‘bye, love you!’ I’d always say, ‘me too!’ She’d laugh, cause she’d know.” 

Lena was embarrassed to be in love for so long. Shamed. Not because she was gay, but because she was her and she was a Luthor and Luthor’s don’t love. Not unabashedly, not openly. Certainly not the way Sam had. 

“Sometimes, if I was working late, the phone would ring, and I’d think ‘oh God, what’s happened’, and then I’d answer and ask what was wrong and she’d say ‘nothing, I just love you.’” 

Lena's voice caught, on the cusp of something again. All that untapped and suppressed emotion that thinking about just brought up images of her wife in her mind. Every memory pressed and folded like dried flowers in a book. Seeing her for the first time, harried and rushed with a stack of overdue library books spilling out of her hands and falling on the ground. The first thing Sam had done was shout at her, and Lena had known she was a goner.

“One day you’ll meet someone, and it’ll be… Life will be brilliant,” Lena managed, trying to calm her nerves that felt tattered and frayed. “Nothing to feel sad about. Not yet.”

A sniff drew her attention. Looking back to Kara, Lena was dismayed to see tears glittering in the sunlight as they fell down Kara’s cheeks, somehow making her seem even more beautiful. Lena berated herself silently, resisting the urge to catch the loose ones clinging to Kara’s eyelashes. 

Before she could even whisper an apology, Kara caught out ahead. Wiping the tears away with a practised swipe. 

“How is it you managed to make me feel better even when you make me cry?” Kara stifled, the edge of humour in her voice clearly for Lena’s benefit. 

“Because talking about my dead wife’s just a natural crowd-pleaser,” Lena answered, the swell of feeling in her chest fit to burst now, but unable to look away again. “ ’Go to’ party conversation if there ever was one.”

Everything about them, everything that they said to each other, toed the line between depressed and worrisome, but it was always what they both seemed to need. Lena had been comfortable sitting in a place where she could speak allowed the way she thought, for she certainly couldn’t do so anywhere else. But the way that Kara looked at her sometimes when she said something, made Lena’s heart clench. It wasn’t worry so much as it was… something else. Something more. 

Kara always did something small when they met, some action that was so wildly unexpected in Lena’s mind that it between an addictive game for her to come back again and again, to chase for another unexpected thing.

Lena hated that she made Kara cry. 

“I like that you talk about her,” Kara whispered, sounding almost guilty for admitting it. “I love that you love your wife and I can’t wait for someone to love me as much as you loved your wife, but you can still be happy. You’re so brilliant. So great, but you’re breaking my heart.”

There was so much they didn’t know about each other, but Lena couldn’t bring herself to label their relationship as one of convenience. Maybe it was born of that, Lena certainly wasn’t insipid enough to call it fate, but it certainly had evolved to be something more. The dark things that had passed between them while the people they mourned lay cold in the ground so close by, dead spectators to their heartfelt confessions. 

Lena missed so much about Sam, it would take a lifetime to list it all down, but that easy intimacy and honesty was easily the thing she missed the most. Never afraid to tell Lena all the things she was doing wrong as well as everything she was doing right. 

The light shifted, filtering through the trees, hitting Kara’s face differently and Lena found herself lost and hit all at once, her words finding new meaning. One of the final conversations with Sam came to mind in the worst way, the words playing out in her mind over and over again. 

Lena fought the urge to reach out and take Kara’s hand, the bile of self-disgust in her stomach doing it for her.

“Don’t worry about me,” she finally said. “I’ll be ok. Things are ok. I’ve got Ruby, my work. You’ll be ok too. We both will.”

She doubted Kara believed her.

* * *

It wasn’t a Tuesday. 

It was undoubtedly the worst day. 

The week leading up to it was the worst week. 

She’d been cleaved in two, and she couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move, she was so numb with it. Sitting here, in front of it even though by now she’d visited so many times, was different then it had been on all the other days. She didn’t know how Kara did it, every week she could talk to her and tell her things, unplug all the that was inside and let out the pressure. But she couldn’t do that. She wasn’t sure she can’t get words out past the block in her throat, and even then she wasn’t quite sure she trusts the words her brain would pick to say anyway.

It wasn’t like she could hear her. 

But it Sam was here, really here, Lena would tell her she loved her. She’d tell her she missed her. She’d tell her she was sorry. Again and again and again, all the things she was feeling. 

Today was the worst day.

Lena heard her before she saw her, but then again she couldn’t see anything but her wife’s name engraved on stone.

“Hey… I just…”

Kara’s stalled words trailed off, awkward, clearly wary if she was wanted. They hadn’t talked about this day beyond one conversation months before when Kara had asked why the date hadn’t been on the headstone. Lena had told her what it was, that Sam had been the one to make that choice. 

“You wanted to check on me,” Lena finished, wondering suddenly why it wasn’t raining.

Surely it should be pouring down with cold, cruel rain. 

Kara sat beside her, Lena could hear the rustle of her clothes. Silently for a long minute. 

“Where’s your daughter?”

Lena closed her eyes. Another reminder of everything she was doing wrong. The biggest reminder of them all. 

“Ruby wanted to go to school today,” she answered grittily, angry with herself for expecting…. wanting more then she was getting. Wondering if there was more she should be doing. “I wasn’t going to tell her what she had to do on the anniversary of her mother’s death. Today, she could tell me she needed to go skydiving, and I’d let her.”

When they had found out that Sam was dying, Lena had floundered. Floundered between reality and nonacceptance. But Sam had moved forward with a determination that Lena had never seen before. Everything had changed, but her overall goal had remained the same. Happiness. 

She and Ruby had attended a joint counselling session every week from the time she’d been given the results, to the week that she’d died, and Ruby had been in therapy ever since. Sam had known what Ruby needed, she always knew what she needed. It wasn’t as if Ruby was failing in school, or didn’t have a social life, or had started displaying erratic behaviour. It wasn’t as if she had suddenly become Lena. But still, Lena worried. It gnawed at her, the distance between them that had never existed before. Because the piece, the person that had linked them together with love as a family wasn’t their anymore, and nothing Lena could do would ever be able to bridge that gap.

“I’m not good like this.”

Lena blinked, wondering who had said that out loud for a brief second before realising it was her. The burning in her eyes returned, like acid bubbling against the retinas, but for once, she allowed herself to feel the sadness of it all. 

People weren’t supposed to be widows at twenty-seven. Children weren’t supposed to be without their mothers, but death and tragedy followed her like she was cursed. Everything she touched came undone with rot and even though she wasn’t superstitious, she didn’t believe in fate and the idea of an omnipotent being ruling over all reminded her too much of Lex’s rantings, Lena wondered how many things she’d ruin before she finally understood that she wasn’t meant to be happy.

If Sam was here…

“I was never the… parent that…” She struggled with the words, things she wanted to say to her wife but could only say out loud now that someone was alive beside her. 

“Ruby was eight when I came into the picture with fun and the gifts and the good times,” she began, easing her way into the memories. “I was trying to be everything that my parents weren’t, I guess. Also, because I was only twenty myself. I met her in college, you know. Sam. We were both studying in Boston. MIT for me, Harvard for her.” 

It had been more straightforward back then for Lena. More comfortable. She existed in a state of rebellion for most of her life, but the genius of her last name meant she’d coasted quickly through two degrees before she could think two hard about them. Her love life had been easier too, a mindless run of girls that she’d see once and sometimes call twice until she met Sam. In many ways, she’d been so ahead for her age, but the emotional crater in her heart was far from mature. 

“Of course, she’d scrapped and strived and was a single mother being everything that I wasn’t,” Lena continued aloud. “Total focus on her goals and for some insane, crazy, asinine reason she thought that I was worth her time. That I was worthy of her daughter’s time.”

It hadn’t been easy, not at all. Sam was older than her, in more than just years. But she’d opened Lena’s eyes to a world beyond her own, a deeper world. Lena never believed in love at first sight, and it certainly wasn’t that way with Sam, but the instant she’d met Ruby, all bright smiles and gap-toothed and funny, Lena knew that’d she’d never be able to move on.

“When Sam and I got married, I didn’t adopt Ruby. We talked about it, Sam and I, but I was ok just being Lena to her.” Lena pulled at her own words, drawing them out even though vinegar filled her mouth. “Ruby had a mom, she didn’t need me to be… that. But then, Sam got sick. And then it was all hospitals and tests and doctors and waiting and then time ran out on that being something I could skate by on, just being Lena.” 

Lena wished she could remember things without feeling sad. Wished the words could leave her without plummeting disaster in her heart. 

“Fun doesn’t really cut it when your wife is asking you to be totally responsible for her daughter when she dies soon…”

Sam had been so sure. She’d been sure the instant she’d asked Lena to marry her. 

“Honestly, I don’t know what she was thinking,” Lena continued faintly. “Every decision I’ve made since then regarding Ruby has been bordering on a disaster.”

Kara’s fingers were on her shoulder then, ghosting with comfort.

“Lena-“

She stood, abrupt and ramrod. Half from the contact, half from revulsion to other’s empathy. 

It boiled behind her eyes, Lena clenched her fists and glared at the carved name. 

“I mean, I moved her to Metropolis for a fresh start, but all that did was take her away from all her friends and any sense of stability she had,” her words felt stuffy and wet, but she couldn’t allow herself to let it out. “Then I moved her back thinking that maybe that would help, but all that did seemed to do was make her even sadder.” 

The broken parts inside of her shifted, making her feel vacant. Relieved that she’d finally said it. Mortified. Lena wished for a way to shutdown the nonessential functions of her brain. A way not to feel.

"Or maybe it’s just me who’s the sad one. Maybe she’s fine, and she doesn’t need therapy, and I’m just spiralling,” Lena closed her eyes. Barricaded them, hoping that the barrier would be enough. “Or maybe I just really, really miss my wife.” 

She breathed in, and out. 

In again.

“Sam was my greatest achievement.” It was all wrong, all so wrong and messed up. “I got Ruby through her too. I’ve never done anything else, really. Not of worth. Nothing else to be proud of. Just that. I won at life.”

Despite the fact that Ruby had slipped a pamphlet about grief under her bedroom door. Despite the fact that she was clinging to control of her company by her fingernails. Despite the fact that Lillian kept calling to shout at her. Despite the fact that her brother still managed to send her death threats in the mail. 

She had won. But now she’d lost. 

“You did.”

Then Kara was next to her. Tall, strong and grieving too, but a beacon of something intangible and wanton. Lena should want to beat a hasty retreat, but the pillar that was Kara folded around her like gravity, pulling Lena into her orbit. 

And suddenly, Lena was pressed against her, tight and hugged with a one-armed sling. Lena stiffened, as if her whole body wasn’t sure what to do before some instinct inside her clicked. 

This is what it felt like to be held. 

Lena folded like a reed into the unnatural warmth that Kara radiated, until she found herself completely encircled and pressed into Kara’s front, her face bent and hidden in the crook of Kara’s neck. 

“I’m not as good as her,” Lena admitted mutedly into Kara’s skin. “And I’m proud of that.”

Lena had never realised before just how quite so _broad_ Kara was. Strong muscles and hard curves that had been hidden beneath a small-town charm and a grieving sister. But there was steel beneath all that Wheaties girl facade. Soft though too. Holding Lena as if she was the most important and precious thing in the world.

“You’re just different.” The whispered words rippled, so close to Lena’s ear. 

But Kara hadn’t known Sam. She’d only known her impression through Lena. But Lena knew that Sam would have loved Kara. Would have loved everything about her. 

“I’m angry, I’m petty, I’m sad,” Lena rattled. “I’m jealous of anyone who’s still got someone.”

Kara hummed, the vibrations of it making Lena shiver.

“How did you get Sam if you were so bad?”

It was said with easy amusement. A casual edge to it, tied like a flung rope to pull Lena out of the swamp she was rolling around in. Familiar. 

“I’m not sure,” Lena answered. “I was just nice to her, I think.”

Lena could feel Kara’s grin, a breath away from pressing against her hair.

“You should try that again.”

Lena sucked in a breath and held it. For a feverish second she imagined that of all the configurations of atoms in the universe, she got to be standing here and now in Kara’s arms. She wished she could hold all the things she wanted and all the things she’d lost in her lungs, like a breath she’d never let out. 

Something happened then, something that hadn’t happened for so long, the starburst image in her mind was of a little girl, clutching her bear and sitting on the edge of a bed while a strange man in a suit told her he was her father. 

The tears burst forth like water from a dam, spilling down her face. She felt the muscles of her chin tremble like a small child. There was static in her head once more, the side effect of the constant fear, constant stress Lena lived with. She heard her own sounds, clawing though her chest, raw from the inside. It took something out of her; she didn't know she had left to give. That was the way it is when people were hard. It was like a theft of the spirit, an injury no other person could see. All the acid and vinegar and self-loathing pouring out and carrying all the much until it finally ran clear and she allowed herself to feel again.

“I miss her so much,” Her voice sounded flinty and desperate even to her own ears, the tears soaking Kara’s front as she said them. “I feel sad all the time. I’m not the person I was. Sam dying was like… I lost most of me, and all the good stuff all the happiness… any joy in anything… I feel like I’m nothing.”

Lena wondered if Kara had been waiting for this moment. The moment of collapse and conclave where she came undone. But Kara wasn’t that cruel. If anything, she was far too kind. 

“That’s not true.”

Kind enough to say things like that and mean them with deep conviction. 

“People think that I’m sort of ok, you know, like I’m moving forward,” Lena narrated, her voice catching with each fresh roll of salt from her eyes. “I’m snarky now and again, and that _this_ is the lapse, but it’s not. This is me all the time now. Everything else is the front, you know?” 

Lena scrunched her face, wondering for a brief jarring second if it could be possible to be consumed by someone’s warmth. But Kara didn’t speak, or move to let her go. She just let her be in the place she needed to be.

“I’m not well, but I remember what it was like to be normal, so I do an impression of that,” Lena continued in a staggering voice. “But this is what I really am. And I want to be normal again, but I’m weak. When Sam was dying I tried to be brave for her, you know, face on for her and for Ruby, to be positive, and even then I’d break down sometimes, and she’d… have to comfort me.” 

She could see her in her mind. Shaven head and thin, layered under blankets on the couch and still the strongest thing Lena had ever experienced. 

“I couldn’t even give her that when she was dying,” Lena sobbed, pity for herself and her failures as a wife and a mother and as a goddamn human being. 

“She was still on duty. Looking after me.”

Time-lapsed. Seconds of it, nothing more, but in that time Kara pulled away without pulling away. Just enough so she could move her hands, clasping Lena’s face gently and brush away the tear. Close enough to speak with no distance. 

“She’d have loved that,” Kara was emphatic. “Because I’m like that too, and it’s better to be needed.”

It shouldn’t be the way it was, but it was too easy not to do so. The parallels, the comparisons, the places they were filling for each other. Kara was kind and good and sweet and funny and all the things that Sam had been, but there was an air of optimism about her that Sam didn’t have. Sam had cut through the world with a desire to see the best in it, but she was realistic about it. She carved her own path.

But Kara parted waves with her presence. 

Where Sam had dark corners and shadows in her, a fire that churned out a woman hellbent on conquering the tasks she put her mind to, Kara was light and gentle and soothed. Sam was active and outspoken and fought for a future that could be all the way until the end. Kara was sensitive and steadfast and flowed like water. 

It was all muted and jumbled and confusing. The lines more blurry and the rules more complicated, separating what was real and what is not real in the mess of grief and loss and quiet moments on a bench under a tree in the in-between world Kara and Lena both seemed to function in now. 

What was she doing? What was she thinking?

Lena pulled away, retreating in more than just one way. She could see in Kara’s eyes that she understood. That Lena was drawing a line in the shifting sand between them.

“Don’t you be like me,” Lena demanded, angry and filled. “Don’t wallow. You get addicted to it. I am, I think. The grief I mean. I sort of know where I stand with it. I just… when something goes well, or I see a glimpse of hope, I get confused.”

A symphony of emotions filled her, a different mirror of ones played across Kara’s face at her words.

”And then when it all turns to shit I go ‘oh, there it is. Now I can get drunk and wait for death’.”

So morbid. So depressing. So honest. 

Lena took another step back.

“When you do find someone, dance with them whenever they want,” she husked. “I wish I’d danced with Sam every time she’d asked. It was because I was embarrassed sometimes, or busy. What I’d give for just five minutes with her now. Holding her, just moving around.” 

Somewhere, in all this, she’d look away from Kara’s face and back to the headstone. The longing filling her voice real and genuine along with the tears still tracking down her face. But then, she heard that telltale sniff, and she looked back up because Kara was crying now too. Enough to make the corners of Lena’s mouth tilt upwards in a fond, wet way.

“See? Back to normal, both crying. Good work.”

Kara snorted, garbled, as she swiped away at the salty trails on her cheeks with the back of her sleeves. A gesture so familiar now to Lena that it made feel something bordering on fond. 

“You’ll be fine,” Lena finished. "I’ll be fine.”

Kara laughed, and the sound made Lena feel light. Light and airy and lost. 

“Of course we will.”

* * *

Kara sitting on their bench was as familiar sight as to her now as Ruby, bleary-eyed in the morning and half slumped into a bowl of cereal. Things this past month had been, well she didn’t want to say easier but definitely eased. Maybe it was just a strange month all round, but something inside her seemed to have shifted into lightness. Ruby no longer seemed to avoid her in their own home, even going so far as to graciously hand over the remote last week when Lena asked if she wanted to watch something together on Netflix. Three hours of binge-watching a car restoration show, Ruby had gone to bed with a smile, and a mumbled ‘goodnight’, and Lena wondered if this is what it felt like in the early stages of establishing a new normal. 

It left a good taste in her mouth and a spring in her step, which halted just as quickly and sharply as if brakes had been slammed when she realised that Kara was sitting on the bench, so much as she was hunched with a half-drunk bottle between her knees, looking like she’d been dragged through the washing machine too many times and as a consequence had lost all her colour. Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying, and exhaustion and Lena scrambled her brain wondering if there was something significant about this day that Kara had told her and she had forgotten. 

So caught up in her own bullshit that she couldn’t even remember-

There she went again. 

Maybe because, even after all this time, even when she’d seen Kara cry and bitter and lonely and grief-stricken, she’d never seen her so stretched. Like thin elastic pulled to the point of breaking. Kara had always been so emotive with everything before, she felt things to an extreme level that should be something Lena would hate, but instead made her endearing. She wasn’t an empty shell, she wasn’t drained of life. All hollow eyes that landed on Lena and stared at her unblinking, pleading for something intangible. 

Lena was afraid. Afraid to touch the issue, afraid to even step forward under the weight of that stare that felt like an iron grip on her skin. Her good mood vanished under it, suffocation settling over her like a thick blanket. So natural in the way Kara didn’t even move, twitch or blink, but sat like a cold, dead thing. 

It frightened her, before Kara finally spoke, sounding frail and delicate and paper-thin. 

“Bad day, I’m afraid.”

Lena’s heart lurched, and she moved forward with ease as if she hadn’t just been on the verge of running away. Sitting beside Kara was easy now, even if she wasn’t sure of her place there today, plucking the bottle from her grip was easier.

“You shouldn’t drink alone,” Lena chastised, before taking a swig and resisting the urge to immediately vomit. 

God, she could handle her liquor, but this tasted like paint thinner.

On the plus side, Kara’s dead-eyed stare shifted into an alarmed look as she hastily grabbed the bottle back, eyeing her with enough concern for Lena to wonder if she’d actually turned as green as she felt. Managing to keep it down, feeling it go straight to her head, Lena tried to regain some composure and wondered to herself how in the hell Kara managed to stomach it if it was her drink of choice. 

Then, something cousin to acid reflux ran up her throat, and she clutched the fabric at Kara’s shoulder to brace herself before she let out an involuntary, highly unladylike, burp that definitely would have had Lillian clutching her pearls. 

As disgusting as her mouth felt, a blush crawled up her neck and filled out her cheeks and ears. Though, upon reflection, it could be blamed on the booze. 

None of it really mattered though, because it made Kara laugh. And that was worth any level of mortification.

“Fancy seeing you here,” Kara said with a lopsided grin, finger the bottle and taking a long slow pull from it, eyeing Lena all the while with a challenge written on her face. 

Daring Lena to ask.

But Lena didn’t rise to the bait, she just added the clue the basket of all the other oddities Kara had displayed since they had met. A plethora of puzzle pieces that made up the woman that was Kara Danvers, all hinting at something big, something momentous, something that Kara almost seemed to want Lena to guess at, but she just continued to ignore. It wasn’t her business to hammer at the foundations of the only person she considered a friend, after all, but Lena would have to be in a coma not to have formed her own conclusions about the secret Kara had that they danced around. 

“You ok?” Lena asked instead, sincere beyond doubt. Wanting to know suddenly with an urgency that shocked her a little. She’d known she’d been treading dangerous ground when it came to their graveyard meetings, but in an instant, Lena could feel herself going to a place she’d been terrified to go to again.

Kara sighed, fingering her bottle. 

“Yeah. Still covering stories that nobody cares about, upsetting people I like, trying to keep my job and not kill anyone. You?” As if planned, despite the rushed sentence which seemed more akin to word vomit then actual words, Kara took a deep breath, and let all the tension drop from her shoulders in a long breath.

Maybe she shouldn’t have, even though it had rapidly become both their thing to do so whenever the other was un-ironically cynical and unwholesome, but Lena laughed. Threw her head back, chuckled deeply, kind of laugh that she felt down to her bones because it was so undeniably delightful for her to know someone who thought the way she did and said it aloud. The only other person that ever seemed to exist on that wavelength had been Lex. Still, his oafish charm had long since vanished under the weight of cruel malice, and Lena thanked whatever atoms had combined correctly that _that_ particular combination hadn’t born fruit in Kara.

“It’s nice to hear you moan about work and relationships,” Lena enamoured with a smile once her laughter died. “Just like a normal person.”

Kara gave her another one of those knowing looks, before she stretched slightly, making as if to crack her knuckles.

“I suppose this _is_ progress,” she answered dryly. “I should pay _you_ for these chats. All that money I've wasted on a shrink, this is much better.” Kara said it with a cheery grin, the colour returned to her face in a rush like a sun in the sky, placing a supposedly placating hand on Lena’s upper arm as her eyes shone with mirth.

Lena could feel it. The chance to get caught up and run away with the tiding ocean that was Kara Danvers, but the urge to say something real landed far more strongly. 

Placing a hand over the hand on her skin, Lena stared at Kara intently. 

“Your friendship means more to me than money.”

A charged moment passed, full of potential and hope and optimism, before it all came crashing back to earth and Lena looked away. Both their hands dropping as if they’d planned it beforehand and their eyes turned back to the headstones of the people they were supposed to be here to see and to miss and grieve. 

A minute, then two, passed before Kara spoke with none of her previous humour.

“Are you lonely?”

It was the perfect start, the ideal question with an incredibly complicated to answer. Because in truth, Lena had been lonely her entire life. Reckless, wild and chasing visions of a reality she’d never quite gotten before.… Before all her feelings really were dead and gone. 

“I only miss one person.”

She did. In every crevice of her life that Sam had left empty and troubled, she missed her. 

“Yeah,” Kara breathed out, her eyes glued on her sister’s name. "Me too.” 

Lena felt like her insides were on fire, that she was the worst of the worst for feeling _longing_ right now when she knew she shouldn’t. Why had everything become so complicated when she wasn’t looking. 

“Do you want to go to that game night thing I told you about tonight?”

Lena wondered if she’d misheard, if her brain had skipped on her the way it sometimes did these days when she got lost in thought. But no, she hadn’t, because Kara was now looking at her with those piercing blue eyes, conviction back along with her colour as well as her life, begging an answer to her question with her mind.

“Oh no,” Lena balked, swallowing the lump of terror in her throat. “I don’t get out much these days.”

Kara reached out, catching her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. 

“It’s hardly out,” she retorted with a playful eye-roll. “It’s at my place, so it’s less out than this. It’s still just sitting down, looking at something. It’ll be fun. Come on.”

Kara said it with far more gravitas than Lena put into her words and suddenly everything felt so weighted, the words between them, her hand still holding Lena’s, the fabric of their jeans softly scratching against one another. Lena wonders how they got here, wonders what the ghosting smile on Kara’s face meant, wonders how it was that Kara seemed to view her and how it was somehow so different to everyone else in the world.

Anyone living anyway.

She should say no. It’s what she wanted to say, but when she opened her mouth say it, Kara had her pinned with some kind of indecipherable look. Suddenly it felt like something could be happening after all and Lena found herself breathing out a different answer. 

“Ok. I’ll come. Ruby’s been wanting to go out with some friends for a while anyway.”

That was partly true, at least she thought it was since Ruby seemed to have a standing appointment to out at least once a week with somebody she knew. At first, Lena had wondered if it was yet another way that her daughter wanted to avoid her, but more then that it seemed that Ruby was truly the social butterfly to Lena’s hermit.

“Or you could bring her if you like,” Kara’s eyes sparked with the suggestion, her grin widening. “Why not, hey? She might enjoy it too.”

The thought, the idea of Ruby being introduced to Kara. To those two worlds colliding into one spelled disaster in Lena’s mind. How she was to go about explaining just how they’d met when Lena had never mentioned her. How she was supposed to explain what Kara was, what she meant or what would never happen. Would Ruby understand any of that? Especially when the relationship between them was hanging by a thread. 

“I’ll ask her.”

She wouldn’t. But the look on Kara’s face was delightful, Lena didn’t have the heart to do anything but lie. 

“We could definitely do with someone who cares about success, cause we are the biggest bunch of losers you will ever meet. But it’s a good bunch.”

The joke didn’t seem to land right in the air between them, and Kara levelled her with a severe look after her grin died. Lena with the sudden, heat stopping realisation that she hadn’t just agreed to board games, but to an introduction to Kara’s friends. The horror of it must have shown on her face because Kara reached for her hand once more. 

Lena reached for sincerity instead. 

“You’re welcome then because I kick ass at Monopoly.” 

Kara smiled, linking their hands further, creating a mess of fingers that Lena didn’t even want to attempt to untangle. Just as suddenly as the tension built, it had broken again,

* * *

Lena was late.

She was never late for things, but in all fairness, she wasn’t sure she really wanted to go to this ‘game night’ Well, it was sort of like visiting wonderland, falling down a rabbit hole into a place she’d never expected to be. She’d mulled it over inside her own closet like she was going on a first date, tossing aside clothes for not pleasing her and spending an inordinate amount of time wondering what the right bottle of wine to bring would be. Drilled into her was a mountain of etiquette lessons, the primary rule flashing that it was the epitome of impoliteness to turn up empty-handed after being invited somewhere.

Still, no amount of fussing over wine choices could quell the burning in her stomach once she finally stood in front of Kara’s apartment door, the address the blonde had scribbled on her hand with a grin slightly smudged now from clammy sweat. She rocked nervously on her feet for a minute before she raised her hand to knock. 

Lena barely had a chance to smile a hello when the door was thrown open. Basically, arm-wrestled into Kara’s tight hug of greeting, Lena went stiff as a board pressed up into the other woman. Partially because she was never good at overt friendliness, but mostly because of the four sets of eyes that were staring at her from over Kara’s shoulder. 

Lena didn’t have too much time to rethink her choice to stay though, being yanked inside immediately once she was realised from Kara’s enthusiastic embrace. Only able to garble out a returned hello as she thrust the two bottles she’d brought into Kara’s hands, as the other woman thanked her profusely with a wild grin and waved her further in so she could shut the door. 

Kara’s apartment looked exactly like she imagined it, and yet nothing like it at all. It was cozy, filled to the bursting with knick-knacks and clutter, clearly laid out in a sort of functional disorganisation. Hastily cleaned, with a pile of shoes near the door and a bundle of coats layered on the chair nearest the kitchen. What caught Lena’s attention the most about it were the photos. Photos absolutely everywhere, in every empty space, most of them of Kara’s smiling face pressed up against a red-haired woman that could only be her sister. Lena would recognise the exasperated eyes of a long-suffering sibling anywhere, even if her’s had turned out homicidal. 

Alex looked different than Lena expected, but then Lena hadn’t really known all thought all too much about it. Until this moment, Alex had just been a faceless name tied to all the memories Kara had shared, in the same way, that Lena assumed Sam was to Kara. Lena’s curiosity was deepened though by the explosion of images, and she wondered if they’d always been there, or if this was the way Kara coped. Where Lena had determined to erase all visual clues of her previous life out of pain, Kara chose the relive every moment for the same reason Lena wondered. Or perhaps it was simpler than that. Maybe it was just a way to not move in any direction at all. 

Lena didn’t have time to muse too much further before she was led over to the living area and sat swiftly on one end of a squashy love seat. At the same time, Kara took the other end, handing a poured glass of something that was definitely not what Lena’d brought, before she shifted in her seat, uncomfortable to be surrounded by strangers who shared. Kara was the first to break the ice, shoving chips and salsa in her mouth with one hand while the other waved introduction to each person sitting around the coffee table piled with board games. 

Nia, the woman on Lena’s other side an ex-colleague of Kara’s and settled in an armchair seemed nice enough. Offering Lena a kind smile to Lena’s curt nod. Her boyfriend, introduced as Brainy, seemed more intense, studying her face with strange scrutiny for a brief few seconds, before getting distracted by the offer of the Top Hat on the Monopoly board. The oldest man in the group, the one with the look of a soldier called J’onn, who cut Kara off before she could say his occupation, offered her his hand to shake. A strange look in his eye while he did it, something that shifted once she’d let go as if her taking it had been a test of some sort. 

The fourth and final member of the group she unfortunately already knew, although not in person, though he certainly recognised who she was if his fierce glare was anything to go by alongside the sound her made when he practically spat out her name.

“Lena Luthor.”

Heads swivelled to face her, including Kara’s who looked quite ridiculous with half a chip dangling from her mouth. Lena sighed internally, wondering if it had been too much to hope for that this night could go cordially if not well. Or course she had to be recognised, and by a person so personally intimate with the crimes her brother had committed no less. 

Truthfully, oddly, it had never actually occurred to Lena to tell Kara her last name. It hadn’t occurred to her to tell her a lot of things really. Like what she did for a living. She was notoriously camera-shy for a reason and had already been estranged from her family for a long time before she had been all but forced to take the reins at the company. Kara’s and her quasi-friendship was strange at the best of times, it didn’t translate well to game nights and introductions, especially not when Kara had probably assumed that her last name was the same as her wife’s and that she hadn’t just invited the sister of the world’s most dangerous egomaniac for dip and chips.

“James Olsen,” Lena managed neutrally, half perched for flight on the edge of her seat and unable to met Kara’s bug-eyed gaze. “This is quite a coincidence.” 

James’ expression darkened under her words, and he looked ready to shout, something she braced herself for. It had been a long time since she’s had to defend herself as a Luthor. Not if you counted the amount of hate mail that still flooded into L-Corp, but it had definitely been a long time since she’d associated that part of herself with all the shit she’d been handling with Kara. Or anything associated with Kara. But, then again, she supposed at some point their strange little co-dependent bubble was going to have to burst.

Ready to be stormed out of the apartment, Lena nearly jumped from her skin when she felt the warm touch of Kara’s fingers on her knee, drawing her attention immediately to the owner of said finger’s face. Kara looking at her with that same, crooked grin that she always seemed to wear when she thought Lena had said something particularly strange and funny.

“Well, now at least I know _you_ can afford to ante up for poker night!” She happily said, before passing a meaningful look toward Nia who flushed all the way down to her roots. 

And just like that, the bubble burst. The comment seemed to settle it for everyone else in the room. J’onn chuckling at Nia’s indignant expression while he dealt out the Monopoly money, Brainy was still studying his Top Hat piece intently as if it were about to reveal the secrets of the universe to him. Even though James’ eyes shifted between casting Kara incredulous looks and Lena dirty one’s, Lena still found herself relaxing in her seat under the weight of Kara’s smile and the still warm touch on her knee. 

It was more relaxed after that, even if Lena still felt like the odd man out. As she had predicted, Lena won Monopoly easily, resisting the urge to smirk at the look of awe Kara gave her as everyone declared bankruptcy and she raked in the rent. Next up was charades, Kara claiming Lena as her partner, earning her another glare from James. Charades, (not Lena’s strong suit), devolved into Pictionary, (definitely not Lena’s strong suit), before finally, people started to stand and help clean up. 

“Did you have fun?” Kara asked her, pouring Lena another glass of whatever she’d been drinking all night. “Admittedly, my skills are a little rusty, but not bad altogether.”

“It’s been a while for me too,” Lena admitted with a small smile, feeling relaxed and warmed by all she’d been drinking.

“Didn’t think there’d be much room for Pictionary in the Luthor household,” James interjected darkly as he stuffed the boardgames back into their spot in on an overflowing bookshelf.

“James!” Kara shouted, indignant, a furious expression on her face as she glared at the tall man with furrowed brows.

The soft hush of the other conversation died suddenly. Stopping where they stood mid-clean-up, glances darting back and forth between James and Kara, who was glaring so hotly Lena was surprised James hadn’t burst into flames.

“What? We’re all just supposed to sit here and not comment?” 

Kara reached to grip Lena’s hand, still glaring as if she was afraid Lena was going to run away. 

“There’s nothing to comment on,” Kara snarled, her hold on Lena’s hand tightening even as Lena’s face remained set in stone. 

“No?” James bit out. “Not even about the fact that we haven’t seen you in person in months, only to be called up out of the blue this afternoon for an ‘emergency game night’. I’m sure you can appreciate that we might be concerned, especially since you failed to mention, and apparently didn’t even know that your new friend is a _Luthor_.”

The implications of that rant, if not the disgusted way in which he’d said her last name, sat uneasily in Lena’s chest. Emergency game night? That could only mean that Kara had organised this entire event for Lena’s benefit. She could spend a month stewing on the why’s, and the wherefores of what that meant, but the embarrassed splash of scarlet covering Kara’s cheeks answered the question more than her brooding ever would.

“James-“

“I’m not my brother, Mr Olsen,” Lena cut through Kara’s words quietly, her face steady when the man’s glare turned to her, glancing quickly and furiously down their joined hands, before turning to her eyes. 

“No?” He sneered. “Then you won’t mind answering some questions.”

Lena didn’t want to seem nitpicky, but at that moment she wondered at Kara’s taste in friends. Certainly, this experience had reinforced more than ever how correct her choice not to have friends was, because quite honestly, James was coming off right now as a bit of an asshole. An asshole with a clear vested in interest in protecting Kara from her, a motive Lena could only applaud, but an asshole none the less. None of the others seemed too keen to step in on this particular mess either. Clearly, there was a lot at play here, beyond just her name. This argument was layered with a lot of things that Lena hadn’t been privy too. Frustration, regret, grief. Kara may have lost her sister, but Alex was something to these people too. 

Family. The people that Kara had pushed away. That had to hurt. 

Lena’s thoughts flashed to Ruby and new guilt twisted in her gut. 

“She didn’t come here to be interrogated!” Kara half-shouted with a clear storm in her eyes. Lena preened at the deeper compliment that lay beneath the words.

“I want to know why she came here at all!” James snapped sharply. “How exactly is it that _you_ two met?”

Kara’s mouth twisted, but her immediate action was to turn to Lena with a reassuring look.

“You don’t have to answer that,” she said gently. “Or any other of his stupid questions.”

Lena’s heart melted at the concern. 

“What?” James continued oblivious. “Is it a state secret?”

There was a long pause, heavy with the question, and even though it had been James’, Lena knew that Kara’s other friends wanted answers too. Answers less about her probably, and more about Kara. How this strange relationship came to be, in all the time Kara had been missing from their lives. What Kara had been doing in all that time. But to explain even an inch of that, Lena would have to reveal a great deal about herself. Talk about things that had only ever existed between her and Kara. Lena didn’t know Kara’s friends, she didn’t know if they deserved answers from her in any way at all, but a greater part of her wanted to talk. Wanted to tell. If only because Kara had been her guiding light through hell, and these people were obviously desperate to understand that they hadn’t lost Kara alongside her sister so many months ago. 

She could read it easily on Kara’s face that she didn’t expect her to say anything at all, but Lena just smiled and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze, before she began to answer through a steadying breath.

“Kara’s just trying to be kind. We met at the cemetery.” 

The implications of what she said read instantly on James’ face. His glare died, the sneer dropped from his mouth, replaced by a sorrowful expression and an immediate slide of the eyes towards Kara then back again. 

Lena’s expression didn’t change though, nor did her gaze move from James’ face. She may understand some of the reason, emotion really, behind James’ attitude, but it still made her heart throb painfully for what she’d have now to explain. 

There was only one reason that they could have met at a cemetery. Because Kara wasn’t the only one who had buried someone.

“Loss does strange things to my family,” Lena continued, trying not to let the bitterness mix with the sorrow. “And I’ve lost a lot of people. You don’t like me, because of my name, but that’s ok because I get it. My brother did horrible things.”

She knows that too well, and not just from the news snippets she’d listened to in the middle of the night after Sam had finished vomiting in the toilet bowl, only to find the restless sleep Lena never could. Lena knows about what Lex did to James personally, because of his connection to Superman, she’d heard about the scars that would never fully heal. And she was a big enough of a coward to resent deeply the circumstances that had put her and James in a position where they’d ever have to meet, even if she wouldn’t change them at fear of never meeting Kara. But all around, more then anything, she hated being compared to the thing that was her brother. 

"Maybe I should have seen it, maybe I should have stopped it and known. But I was living my life with my wife,” Lena crunched out, feeling like she’d swallowed gravel. “Waking up with her, every day feeling truly happy and vulnerable and safe. Living in her laughter and the safety of her arms. Maybe I should have been there with Lex, maybe I could have stopped it, but I made a promise to my wife to be there for her, forever. Through everything.” 

Her marriage to Sam hadn’t exactly hit the front papers, mostly because she was the banished, the black sheep of the family when it happened, and all the media focus had been on the golden child Lex. Sam’s illness and death she had paid a small fortune to keep from being plastered across the news, amid the shit-storm that was Lex’s fall from heaven when any story about any Luthor was lapped up like warm milk. 

So she could tell from the dawning apprehension on James’ face that while he hadn’t been aware of her situation before, he definitely knew where she was heading with her words now. 

“Sleeping in the hospital room by her side, loving her more then I’ve ever loved anything, especially myself. I lost her last year. And it broke me. Not a day went by when I didn’t think of killing myself.” 

What do you say when somebody, a stranger, drops that bomb on your lap? Not that Lena had said it to shock, just to be honest. It seemed to hit James though, his face turning grey with it. Her heart was beating so loud in her ears now, Lena almost missed the gasp from Nia and the way Kara’s hand tightened infinitesimally around hers in comfort. 

“But I didn’t, because I’ve got my daughter,” Lena continued, steel lining her words even though her eyes started to prickle. “I didn’t stay alive for anything else, not for a really long time. Not for my company, not to be better than my family, not to be anything but alive and there for her.” 

Ruby, her sole reason for existence. Until…

Well, that was a thought that should remain unfinished.

“You don’t know my situation, that’s ok,” Lena continued with a wry, mirthless smile. “You see me and see a Luthor, that’s ok too. You don’t need to know anything else about me. I don’t need to explain myself to you. Because all that matters is that I had the best marriage imaginable. Magical. When my wife died, I was suicidal, and depressed and broken, but now I’m not so much anymore.”

Lena felt hollowed by the time she’d finished speaking, her final words met with silence around the room. James stared at her like she’d just sprouted an extra head, his mouth lax and eyes unblinking. Kara’s other friends, all still standing frozen, seemed even more rooted to their spots with conflicted looks on their faces. Half ready to flee, half prepared to cry. Lena certainly hadn’t intended on that response, and she definitely didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for her. A single, burning instinct filled her.

A need to leave, right now. 

She barely had time to formulate it into a thought though, before Kara’s next words blasted out of her chest in a rush. 

“I’m Supergirl.”

The room’s tension, awkward before, felt like fractured glass now. Everyone in it seemed to have stopped breathing, wide-eyed and switching between staring at Kara and Lena, waiting for something to happen. Maybe for Lena to let out an evil cackle, throw a hidden kryptonite bomb she’d smuggled in her pants. Maybe they were wondering what on earth Kara was doing, if her mind had utterly snapped in a bare moment of insanity, revealing to a Luthor who she really was.

It explained everything, of course. Why there’d been more tension then air at the idea of Luthor in their midst. It explained the fact that Kara was able to drink that godawful alcohol (probably alien) this afternoon without throwing up her liver. It explained how she never needed a jacket, even in the height of winter. It explained her voracious appetite and how, when the sunlight caught her cheeks in just the right way, she seemed almost ethereal. God-like. 

Kara just watched her, glasses in hand after she removed them, with the same lopsided grin she always wore as if she hadn’t just dropped Lena in the middle something huge, and at that moment, Lena’s only instinct was an unbridled delight.

“Can I get your autograph for Ruby?” She questioned excitedly. “You’re her hero.”

J’onn snorted, Nia laughed, Brainy stared at her with a strange mix of vacancy and happiness, James still watched her warily, but Kara’s eyes sparkled as she reached for a pen, as if knowing that would be Lena’s reaction all along.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ughh, what the hell is going on with the world... To all the long suffering followers out there, I haven't forgotten about my other WIP's, they will all be updated at some point. That point being far away lol. 
> 
> Let me know what you thought in the comments below, love to here y'allses thoughts :)


	2. Recover

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We are the reckless, we are the wild youth  
> Chasing visions of our futures  
> One day, we'll reveal the truth  
> That one will die before she gets there

Her days had been a blur of newness. New in every sense of the word. Lena had never experienced the joy of receiving emoji jammed text messages at two in the morning, all because she'd caved a month before a volunteered her number to a wildly grinning Kara, something that was supposed to be just in case she needed to contact her for an emergency, an excuse Kara hadn't believed in the slightest. She'd also never had a superhero land on her balcony at lunchtime, carting in donuts and pizza and burgers and smiles. Her secretary was experiencing some newness of her own, opening her office door to find her laughing next to the city's caped heroine with milkshake down her front, before blinking and backing out the door without a word. 

Newness too in that Ruby and had started to do things together again. Lena had been invited to re-attend her games again, invited being a stretch as it was more of a grunted request that Lena bring the oranges next time. But still, Ruby had smiled when Lena hugged her fiercely. But Lena allowed herself to feel excited about it, revealing to Kara without a hint of embarrassment that she had taken to practising her cake baking skills every night to make sure that this year, Ruby's birthday would be the best she could make it. Of course, Kara's offer to do a Supergirl flyby would help enormously too, considering the autograph alone had earned Lena significant points in the parenting department. 

Maybe it wasn't newness, perhaps it was just a month of rediscovery. Rediscovery of fun and happiness and all the things that Kara had introduced like a whirlwind into her life. But despite how much Kara's presence in her life had changed things for the better, Lena still found herself sometimes at their bench, under the tree, in front of those two headstones on Tuesdays. Why exactly, she didn't really want to pinpoint. Maybe it was because those meetings had always felt different, special and unique. Perhaps because it was the spot where both of them could explore the darker part of themselves. Maybe because it was were it all started. Whatever it was that they were. 

And something in Lena's heart always eased when she saw the back of Kara's blonde head. 

Currently, hyped up on the three unique alien-dripped coffees she'd brought for herself, (Lena delegated her own singular black and an entirely normal one), Kara was rummaging through Lena's handbag searching for the tic-tac's she'd left in there last week for Lena to 'hold on to'. Lena tried to ignore the noise, reading the fifth pitch article Kara had thrust upon her for inspection, hoping it would be the piece she presented to Cat Grant that would earn her job back. It was good, as good as the first four. Still, Kara would undoubtedly not agree and would write yet another despite her assurances. 

Crossing her ankles, Lena wondered briefly if she should start bringing cushions for this bench, reading through the final page when Kara's rummaging abruptly stopped.

"What are these?"

Lena looked over at the question, Kara staring at her with disquiet as she held out a yellow tube of pills. Lena glanced down at them briefly, quirking an eyebrow before she answered. 

"Sleeping pills."

Kara's brow furrowed and the pills in her hand rattled slightly.

"Why?"

"To help me sleep," Lena replied slowly, thinking the answer would be obvious.

Kara's frown deepened.

"They have your wife's name on them," she said accusingly blunt. "They look old. What are they doing in your purse?"

Lena rolled her eyes, realising what had inspired this particular line of questioning. Kara had never given her shit before about it, but things had been… shifting. Maybe she should make a note to herself to dial back on any, and all bleak reveals from here on out.

"So I don't have to go far to kill myself, of course." Sarcasm ladled in her voice as she plucked the bottle from Kara's fingers and yanked her bag back towards her side. "Mobile, useful."

Kara caught her fingers, something she just kept doing. Her frown had morphed to concern. 

"Lena," she sighed in that breathy way of her's that had Lena's spine-tingling. "Seriously."

Lena's mouth gapped slightly, ready to rush an answer, but the warmth inside her shifted through her stomach now at the sight of Kara's eyes so close to her own.

"What?" She deflected awkwardly instead, pulling her fingers out of Kara's grip and trying to ignore her crestfallen expression. "There was a time… but you know…. I mean, you could take them away, but if I really wanted to do something, there are tall buildings…razors…. coat-hangers in the walk-in."

So maybe she wasn't wholly over morbid humour. 

Instead of responding in kind, or tilting a grin, Kara's concern seemed to grow more pronounced. 

"Why are you still thinking like that?" 

Lena battled the urge to sigh or tug at the edges of her sleeves the way she did when she was a child. 

"I'm not, particularly," she half-muttered, feeling uncomfortably like she was being judged. "Not all the time. Did you just come here to nag me?"

The last words were spat heatedly, but Kara didn't seem affronted. It wasn't reproach in her eyes, but fear. Fear for Lena. 

"Are you ok? Please tell me you're ok."

It was begging more than a question, in a thick voice clogged with the same emotion that was swimming in Kara's eyes. Instinct moved her to take back Kara's hand from where she'd dropped it, entwining their fingers and give them a squeeze. 

"I'm ok. Looking to the future." Lena said it offhandedly, but there was nothing offhanded about her meaning. She meant it with every fibre of her being.

Kara didn't look reassured.

"That's what I'm worried about."

Lena didn't feel as brittle as she once did, but with Kara staring at her the way she was the warm glow in her heart shifted and muted all at once. 

"You remind me of Sam sometimes," Lena whispered involuntarily. 

Confusion, along with something else flashed across Kara's face and Lena found herself at a rush to explain why she'd said it.

"Everyone else had to be ok before she could be ok. At night, in bed, she'd say 'goodnight', and sometimes I wouldn't answer her, just to wind her up. And she'd go 'Say it! You've got to say it, or I can't sleep!'. And I'd go 'why, it's stupid', and she'd go 'say it!' And I had to say it last as well, and eventually, I would and then… then she could sleep."

Her voice dwindled off, the small smile she'd had dying on her face as her mood plummeted. Feeling better and feeling worse all at once. Still, she was surprised to feel a tear roll down her face, only realising when it fell to hit her collarbone. 

"What are you doing today?" Kara asked gently, rubbing the back of her thumb lightly over the skin of Lena's fingers. 

"I don't know…" Lena shrugged, trying to sweep it all off. "Work, maybe. Follow Ruby's example there. Charge on."

Truthfully though, she felt exhausted, as if the past month of happiness was finally doling out its price. A plan to head home and fall into bed was slowly formulating in her mind, and she must not be as subtle as she thought, Kara clearly reading the idea all over her face. 

"Come on," Kara smiled, sounding eager, her fingers still tight on Lena's. "What's the point in owning the company you work at if you can't give yourself a day off? Spend the day with me. We'll do whatever you want, except work."

Lena rolled her neck, arching an eyebrow at Kara.

"What if I want to drink and cry?" 

Kara's grin widened at her sardonic words.

"Then we'll drink and cry. But together. Not alone."

Kara had told her some about her life as Supergirl. Her life as Kara Zor-El. Her life as a Kryptonian. And even though Kara never seemed to care, there was something to be said about a woman who'd align herself so obviously with a Luthor after all that had happened between Lex and Kara's cousin. 

Stronger together. 

Lena felt herself tearing up again, and she cursed the fact this newfound emotional freedom seemed to have come hand in hand with bawling her eyes out. Kara looked concerned, but Lena waved it away. 

"Lot of back to back anniversaries right up." It wasn't quite a lie, but it definitely wasn't the truth. "But I promise, I'm not always a mess."

Kara didn't seem to pick up on what she wasn't saying. Instead, her smile reappeared.

"Really? Cause you were starting to make me feel better about myself."

Lena rolled her eyes.

"Well, you know, that's what I do."

They fell into comfortable silence after that, both looking out over the landscape. It was a beautiful day, thankfully, even though once again the season was starting to turn to winter. Of course, Kara didn't loathe winter the same way she did. Benefits of being a furnace Lena guessed. 

"Do you believe in God? Or like, heaven? Afterlife and all that?"

Lena wondered at the question, not so random considering where they were. Still, Kara wasn't looking at Lena or even at her sister's headstone when she asked it. Instead, she was staring at Sam's and Lena couldn't read what was in her eyes. 

"No," Lena answered quietly. "I don't. I didn't before she died either. It's not like my worldview was changed or anything. All we really are is memories to people when we go. She's not in any pain, that's the most important thing."

Kara's expression didn't change throughout Lena's explanation. As the moments stretched in silence after she finished, Lena wondered if she'd said the right thing. After all, she had no idea what Kara believed. With all the people Kara had lost, maybe she needed to believe. 

"With Alex, I wondered if it should have been me instead, all the time, but I'd rather live missing her then for her to live missing me. That's how much I love her."

Kara's words were unexpected. And broken. Not for the first time, Lena found herself at a loss for how to comfort someone else. But Kara had done so much for her. So much, but still, she hesitated, before the look on Kara's face made it shatter.

"How did she die?"

All this time, she'd never asked, and Kara had never volunteered the information. Unlike Lena, who just couldn't seem to stop repeating Sam's cause of death over and over again like as an explanation, shield and perhaps an excuse all rolled into one.

A full minute, then two, passed silently after Lena asked, she wondered if she had done the right thing when Kara took a deep breath and answered slowly.

"On a mission. Yeah, took the bullet meant for me. Kryptonite." 

Kara closed her eyes and looked down, silent tears running down her cheeks. Lena knew better than to say anything now. 

"I should have been faster," Kara crunched out as if the words were like gravel in her teeth. Her loose fist tightened, and her knuckles turned white. The other still clutched at Lena's hand like a lifeline. 

"But then… Well. So that sucked. She died for me. They all want me to be better, to get better. Be more myself again. I can't though. That's why I lost my job, and it's why I'm such a shit friend now."

Lena knew it wasn't true, but she knew Kara did. With a face twisted in pain and her eyes still shut tight, even though it wasn't enough to stop the tears. 

"I lost everything once before too. My whole world and Alex was the foundation that I built a new one on, and now she's dead too. That's why I come here every Tuesday, like clockwork. It's why I'm damaged beyond repair. Survivors guilt. Except, losing my whole planet made me want to save this one and losing Alex just makes me want to avoid mirrors and shout at the poor barista who mixed up my coffee order. Now I'm just, not me anymore. Struggling to see the goodness in humanity when before I just knew it was there."

Kara shuddered, before the tension in her spine loosened and her shoulders slumped. Opening her eyes, she turned her head to look at her sister's headstone, her mouth pinched in a tight-lipped, mirthless smile.

"Still, I'm glad it wasn't me, cause I'd never want her to live like this. Not when her whole life, she looked out for me. I feel terrible for feeling terrible, though. Alex was so good, but I took up all the sunlight. Centre of attention. Absolutely shit."

Lena wondered about the person that was in so many photos on Kara's walls. She wondered what it would have been like to know her in person, even though it seemed to know Kara was apparently to know Alex. Lena wondered if she would have liked the woman who was so unabashedly apologetic, so fiercely protective of her sister and devotedly loyal to her friends. She wondered if that woman would have liked her. 

Would have liked the fact that Lena was so stupid, reckless and careless, wrapping Kara up in the web of her own bullshit because of it. 

Probably not. 

Instead of dwelling on all of it, she let out a long, dramatic sigh and held out the bottle of pills for Kara to take.

"Maybe I _should_ give these to you. You need them more then I do." 

It was Lena's attempt to brush it off, but she found herself startled when Kara turned to her for the first time, blue eyes slightly bluer shrouded in unshed tears and highlighted by the pale light filtering through the tree's leaves. Then Kara laughed so abruptly she snorted at Lena's deadpanned words, and Lena found herself immediately smiling proudly in kind at the sight of Kara's shoulders shaking with it.

"Oh, shut up. You're horrible." Kara's giggling continued before she let out a weary sigh. The weight of the world dropping away from her face. "You're not really though. You're just… You're the best. Easily my best friend. We've just got to stop taking ourselves so seriously and get our shit together."

Kara smiled a smile full of trouble. It was a smile that caught up in Lena's lungs and stopped her breathing, The kind of smile that could make Lena's thoughts drift and get lost. The kind of smile that said she could lift buildings and move mountains, but couldn't kill a fly. The kind of smile that Lena yearned to see again, every minute, in spite of everything she knew couldn't be.

And that final thought was what always managed to wrench her back to reality. 

"Speak for yourself, I never took myself seriously," Lena answered, attempting a smile herself. "But you're my best friend too."

In one inhuman movement, Kara was suddenly hugging Lena tight. The past month was filled with newness, but the greatest sign of it was that Lena immediately melted into the sudden touch. Why Kara felt the need to constantly touch her, she'd never know, but she'd long since deduced that it was a core personality trait. And after all this time, it actually brought Lena a great deal of comfort. So much comfort that once again, embarrassingly, Lena started to cry.

Kara pulled back immediately.

"Hey…" She crooned, her hold still warm on Lena's shoulders.

"No, I'm fine," Lena waved her away, sniffing. "It's just… It's not people dying, it's the kindness I've got a problem with. Towards me, I mean. I don't think I deserve it."

Understanding filtered through Kara's eyes. Reaching up with her hand, Kara wiped away the tears on Lena's cheeks gently, fingers lingering on her skin. Jarringly, Lena realised just how close Kara's face was. Close enough to see the flecks of gold in the blue of Kara's eyes. Close enough to wonder at the smoothness of Kara's skin. Close enough to wonder if Kara's parted lips tasted as good as they looked. Close enough to lean in and in and in…

Lena shook her head, her spine rigid as she pulled back. Furious with herself and warring with all the feelings in her heart. Kara was like a tornado. Of dreams and possibilities and things that could be. Intangible and unknowable and all so relatable. Everything that Lena couldn't wrap her head around and everything she wanted to. 

It was all so cruel, and Lena couldn't even look at her. 

"Well," Kara said breezily, without a hint of what had almost just happened. "Me neither if you don't give me those damn sleeping pills."

* * *

Kara slotted herself into Lena's life with weird perfection. Like a warped jigsaw piece with all the right angles, but peeling edges. Kara seemed to be everywhere all at once when Lena wanted her, but nowhere to be seen when Lena retreated into herself. Tuesdays were a given, whenever Lena went to the cemetery which was only ever on a Tuesday, Kara was always there, waiting on the bench. Lena wasn't close to people, she didn't particularly like many, but even after the first disastrous attempt, Lena found herself once again on Kara's invitation to a game night. This time, with Ruby in tow, something Kara found positively delightful. 

"So, Ruby," Kara started with a grin after she claimed her for her partner, pairing Lena with a smiling J'onn and designating a still grumpy James as the referee. "Lena's told me you play sports. I never was very good at sports myself, I had a tendency to break too many noses. She's also told me you're an honour student, in Drama Club _and_ you're thinking about joining the school paper."

Ruby flushed a deep red, making Lena groan.

"Kara, don't embarrass her."

"I'm not!" Kara answered, indignant, before turning back to Ruby. "Am I?"

Her daughter coughed, unable to play it cool though if the grin on her face was anything to go by.

"No, you're all good."

The seasons shifted again, Ruby asked her to teach her how to build an engine, and Lena caught herself singing in the shower again (not well). By the time the leaves started to fall on the trees, Lena's individual interactions with her daughter, without a buffer, had magnified from waspishly nonexistent to something better. Something more. Something, that when Kara showed up at her door one rainy afternoon with an old and battered Wii under her arm, leading Ruby to enter the living room to the sounds of their laughter as Lena's tennis followthrough finished with a broken vase.

Lena had been unsure what Ruby would make of Kara, but she needn't have worried. Ruby got along better with Kara then Lena did, even if she did cast them both a strange look whenever Kara sat next to her, so close that their knees touched. 

And suddenly, Kara wasn't just in her life, she was in her daughter's life. All the time. Kara had Ruby's number far quicker then she'd had Lena's. It was Ruby who invited Kara around for dinner on the weekends, and Ruby who laughed until coke came burning out her nose at on of Kara's jokes and it was Ruby who invited Kara to her science fair. Lena positively bursting with pride at the first place ribbon while Kara took pictures. So much of it became Ruby and Kara and Kara and Ruby that Lena lost track of when this had all started and when it would all end. Everything had become mixed and folded and entangled into itself that sometimes weeks would pass before Lena remembered that none of this was real. Not real in the way her life had been before. Sure it was new, shiny and felt so, so, good but it wasn't honest. 

A band-aid solution that made her heartache. Playing at happy families. 

More holidays passed, more hard days. More tears and lows. Alex's birthday passed, and Lena found herself visiting the cemetery even though Kara hadn't invited her, a part of herself wondering if it was the right thing to do and the even larger part of herself mollified that Kara had been waiting for her with a picnic basket and an astronomical amount of food and bottle of wine.

"Alex would have liked you," Kara said before Lena could speak, placing a full glass in front of both her sister's headstone and Sam's. 

Lena sat as she drank, and she stayed quiet as Kara talked. She told Lena about the red skies on Krypton, the way they cast everything in a soft glow. She talked about twin moons, waterless seas and icy tundras. She talked about the matrix, how she was destined for a life in the science guild, but how it was her Aunt Astra's stories that kept her awake at night. Kara talked about things and places and people that were long forgotten and would never be seen again with so much love. Lena couldn't even comprehend how somebody who had lost so much in her life could still stand and breathe and live. 

"You find things. People, places… just one thing that keeps you here. That gives you hope. Remember?"

Lena talked too, on the days when the cracks in her soul were too many to ignore. She told Kara things that she was afraid to even admit to herself. Things that she missed, things that she had given up on hoping for, things that she feared. All the things she felt she was failing at, especially when it came to Ruby. 

The lines blurred between them, Lena finding herself bringing a thin chessboard, coffee and books to swap for Kara's sketches of flowers, burned CD's she still loved to listen too and lists of all the best places in National City.

And when Lena found herself sitting on the edge of a new release, with pressure from her PR department to grant at least one interview, it was Kara she first thought of. Her phone recording between them as she scribbled furious notes, illegible to Lena's eyes, and transformed to a reporter in front of her.

Kara got her old job back, and within a week, Lena received an email from James' work account apologising for his behaviour. Something Lena was half-convinced Kara had sent herself before the man actually smiled at her the next week when Kara invited them all to her apartment for a movie. 

Things with Kara's other friends moved forward too. Strangely. Lena liked to think she wasn't easily surprised, but when Nia sent her a text one day asking if the National City International Film Festival was worth the amount of money tickets cost, and if it was worth it to take her boyfriend too, Lena needed an hour before she could reply a simple 'yes'. And while Lena determined to have words with Kara for handing out her number willy-nilly, she definitely hadn't expected an extra ticket thrust into her hands with a sheepish smile as Brainy waved over Nia's shoulder the next time they met up for game night. Brainy himself, she liked the most. It seemed once you got him talking, he never seemed to stop. Rambling on about subjects that would probably leave most people glassy-eyed, if most people weren't Lena Luthor who also took an avid interest in the potential ramifications of molecular biology on their understanding of particle physics. And even if he wasn't allowed to discuss the future, Lena's eyes bugging when she found out that little detail, it didn't stop Lena from trying to weasel answers out of him in Kara's kitchen when they were both up to their elbows in soapy water. J'onn was the strangest by far, more of a father figure than a friend to Kara. Sometimes she caught him staring at her with a strangely contented expression on his face, as if her presence brought him a great deal of peace. It made her uncomfortable, enough for her to avoid his gaze if she could help it. 

Mostly, Lena's assimilation seemed to make Kara happy. Lena gathered from snippets Kara's friends were happy that Kara seemed to be living again. Lena guessed they thought she was the cause. 

In the month leading up to Halloween, Kara grew unusually quiet, before finally revealing that it was Alex's favourite holiday. 

"She'd always dress up as Supergirl. Stupid joke."

It was a long shot, particularly morbid maybe, but Lena made sure to be early the next week so that when Kara arrived, she was ready and waiting, in character and wrapped in her own store-bought red cape.

Kara had laughed until she cried. 

The leaves fell completely. Lena removed the single photo of her had Sam she had hidden in the bottom of her closet and put in back on her desk. Kara cut her hair. 

"It's cute."

Her company grew frustrating, but then it was always frustrating, Ruby's psychologist once again held her up as she paid and asked again if she had considered therapy herself. 

Lena fired two board members.

Kara went on a date, with a man that she hated. She went on another the next week. She hated that one too. Of course, she told Lena all about it. She told Lena how her psychologist wanted her to take more steps forward, how she was looking for a connection, how she felt guilty that Alex's life revolved around her's instead of her own. How the last time they'd spoken before Alex died, it had been an argument. The shot that killed Alex was instant. 

So many unfulfilled dreams, and apologies not said. 

Lena didn't go to the cemetery for a few weeks after that, and when she did turn up next, the first thing she asked Kara was if the DEO would be interested in working with L-Corp. Kryptonite protection. Lex's old notes becoming useful once more, for something bigger then Lena's ego and thirst to be more than just her family's last name. 

A Luthor and a Super, working together.

Kara said yes. 

* * *

They're at the cemetery, the way they always were, nearly a year to the next Tuesday since they'd first met, and the first days of winter and the sun barely warmed Lena's skin. It was a beautiful day, albeit cold. If Lena could find a way to banish the cold without irreparably harming the environment she would, but admittedly it did have the positive effect of her being able to effectively excuse how close she would sit to the furnace that was Kara Danvers. 

Lately, or not so much lately if she would stop lying to herself, things had shifted between them. As if Kara had finally regained her footing, or at least a handhold, in the real world and Lena… hadn't. 

Lately, she'd just been distracted and frustrated. There was a blockage in her brain, something that was non-functional. Everything on the surface seemed to be moving forward, and she was happy. The company, her work with Kara and Supergirl. Hell, she'd only had one assassination attempt in the past two months, and it was so pathetically planned, Lena was half-tempted to send Lex a card thanking him for remembering her. 

Kara hadn't quite gotten the joke when she'd told her. 

Kara didn't seem to get a lot of things these days, always with the distracted look on her face, the half-uncomfortable grimace she flashed when she didn't think Lena noticed. There was something bubbling underneath, brewing, something she wasn't saying but obviously wanted to. Lena was under no illusion, they hadn't made promises of honesty to each other, so she had been content to wait patiently. Anticipating an axe dropping on something. 

It's why the comfortable silences between them on this bench, stretched into uncomfortable. Kara distracted by her _something other_ , and Lena distracted by Kara's non-verbal behaviour enough for her to end up staring at the sky. It had been a relatively cloudy day, though they were starting to take on the ominous dark grey colour that indicated forthcoming rain. More fucking rain and cold and if the weather report was right for once, a season of thunderstorms were ahead of them. Something about the deep rumbling and loud clapping had always terrified her. As a child, she had just rolled herself up in blankets in an attempt to wait it out with a pillow over her head, but the older she became, the more she sat at windows watching the flashes light past like swift birds. It still terrified her, but the rush of fear made her feel alive. Grounded. 

Lena would probably have quite happily watched the clouds for a considerably longer time, even though she was starting to regret not bringing an umbrella, had Kara not suddenly started speaking beside her. 

"I used to think I was always going to be terrible at living on Earth."

Lena blinked, her brow creasing, slightly lost for a second. Jumping in on random trains of thought was a staple by now between them, but Kara's grimace, and the zoned-out expression in her eyes made Lena wonder if she had missed more then just a silent head argument. 

"I never seemed to fit into the expectations that anybody had," Kara continued, sounding bitter. "And I didn't really want to. Sometimes I still wonder if I was meant to be here."

Kara pursed her lips, looking either annoyed or thoughtful, or maybe a mixture of both, after she finished. Enough to leave Lena certain that she was definitely missing something. Kicking her feet aggressively enough into the dirt to leave tracks, Lena wondered what had brought on this sudden out of planeness. Maybe another bad date that wasn't going to lead anywhere, though Kara seemed to have slowed down slightly with those much to the relief of Lena's ears, long since decided that listening to recaps of Kara's evenings out was enough to make her want to fling herself into space. 

Still, she tried to shake off her own… whatever feelings, and refocus on what Kara had said exactly.

"I don't think anybody's life should be about being someone, something," she started after a few seconds of quiet mulling. "What does that even mean when there are so many things the world tells you _you_ shouldn't be, even though it makes you happy? It's an evolution. You're always forming into the next version of yourself, even if that means breaking the ceiling of the roof someone else built over your identity." 

Kara didn't nod, didn't look like she'd heard a word when with a sudden snap of her head, she was staring at Lena. Looking deep into her eyes with so much life, Lena's breath actually caught. Making her wondering briefly if she'd really just been thinking about clouds instead if the way that Kara could turn her world on a dime and look at her like she wanted- 

"I joined a dating app."

Kara said it flippantly, and Lena's heart did a funny little squiggle in her chest before what she'd said finally registered. In the distance, Lena could hear the sounds of the city. A million and more cars and streets and the lives of people, moving under the smudged sky. But the sound that overwhelmed everything was the rush of blood in her veins, through her body and pulse echoing like drums in her ears. Briefly, vainly, Lena wondered if she had misheard. Then if the universe hadn't had dit's fill already on playing cosmic jokes on her. 

"You what?" Her throat seemed to close up as she was overcome with emotion. It was the only thing she managed to say. The only stupid thing. Lillian's words, venom dripping of unworthiness, came rushing back to her, and panic seized her heart.

"I joined-

"Why?" Lena managed to interrupt before she had to hear it again. "Why do you keep… never mind."

She tried to look away. That would be appropriate. She'd already revealed too much. But Kara's fingers, her mouth, flickered.

"No, say it."

Lena didn't know anything. She was so stupid and idiotic, and it was all so wrong. But why did it have to hurt so much?

"You don't enjoy it," Lena whispered, too afraid to speak any louder because she knew her voice would crack. "You just go on these dates and then come back and tell me how much you don't enjoy it."

All this time, Kara was still staring, almost glaring, at her. Such intensity that Lena had thought meant… Not that it mattered anyway. Deadweight filled her heart at her own slips, the vulnerability filling out the cracks. What was wrong with her? What an idiot she was. 

"I'm living, Lena." Kara's words were slow. Methodical. Oozing with heavy syrup, and all Lena felt was patronised now under that same stare. "That's what people do."

Anger, balled up and shaking, spun in her heart like the time she accidentally laundered a metal belt-buckle.

"What you're doing is _not_ living." A sneer drawn on her lips now, as natural as breathing. "That's not what life is."

Kara had the audacity to seem affronted. As if her every breath wasn't another spoonful of humiliation for Lena. 

"Oh, and you would know. Mrs' Expert on living'."

It was defensive. A snap. But Lena's fingers still clenched in her lap. 

"I like to think I know a little bit about it, yes," she snarled, feeling borderline rabid with it.

She knew living. She knew life and love and joy bursting the seams of your heart, making you realise that what it meant to exist was so much bigger then what you thought. Kara knew that she knew that. 

Kara's eyes were so pale, so searching. Lena's heart hammered in her chest, and she could still feel the pulse of it through her skull. Eventually, Kara just sighed and looked down at her cuticles, flicking her fingers.

"Lena, I don't want to go there-"

"Why not?" Lena's voice held a thread of tremble as she faltered, fear creeping in. 

Kara eyes back on her's. That look back in her eyes. That feeling that had been growing in every touch, every moment since they'd first met. A Rolodex of moments running back and forth and back again. Every smile, every breath, every lingering daydream where the face she'd thought of, the first name, wasn't Sam's. Burger and shakes and fries and boardgames and Ruby's face, looking at her with a smile and so alive. Pride and sorrow and pain and giggles and humour and shields and walls and suffocation and God, if only Lena could breathe underneath all the layers she'd piled onto herself. All of it, balanced and imperfect against the weight of infinity from before and after every moment that was theirs. The guilt held at bay, the denial along with it. 

The bubble burst like a dam wall; the second she saw the look in Kara's eyes shift to something more resolute. Ready for a gamble. Ready to fit the final jigsaw piece into place.

"Because I think you're jealous."

Cold. Cold water. The force, the pressure of it. Lena was ready to drown, and all she felt was blank and cold and dead. 

"Jealous?" She repeated, numbly and low, given Kara this one chance to draw it back.

But Kara's eyes, the fierceness grew like fanned flames.

"Yeah."

Lena hated Kara. She hated her more at that moment then she'd ever hated anything in her life. More then misery, more than hospitals. More than cancer. Wounds unhealed ripped upon under the eyes that had helped heal them. Unspoken truths laid bare and stripped for parts. 

How _dare_ she?

Lena wanted to crack, from the foundations of her heart through the rungs of her soul. Ready to melt and fall apart and come undone in every single way. But that hatred burned brighter than all of it. Instincts, trained and drilled in her from the first stinging slap Lillian had left on her cheek. No mercy, no weakness. Be cruel. She was a Luthor, they didn't beg, they took. 

Hurt her back. Hurt her _worse_. 

Lena's usual hardness returning as she stiffened at the accusation, eyes colder than ice. 

"Are you in love with me, Kara?"

It was a knife thrust deliberately at the emotional, beating hurt that was Kara. Lena wanted her face to play. She wanted to lash like a whip and the wound to sting. And it did. Lena could see it on her face. The colour drain and her eyes filled with it. Betrayal. Raw and real.

Good, Lena thought. Now she knew what it felt like.

Kara's mouth drew a thin, pale line now.

"I'm not answering that," she huffed, folding in on herself. Angling away, which only served to make Lena even more furious. 

"Why not? It's a simple question!" Lena insisted, her face a twisted, sharp knife, snarl as she launched to her feet. Bubbling in her chest, a stew of frustration and humiliation. "You go on all these dates that you don't want to go on, but then you come back, and you talk to me about them and touch me and laugh. I'm not an idiot. You're mad at me for being jealous? Are you in love with me?"

Lena didn't know what she expected to come from this argument. She just wanted it to squash. To flatline and bruise. She didn't want Kara to stand in turn. Didn't want her to thrive and fill with courage. Didn't expect her to answer with enough raw power, Lena wondered if she couldn't burn away the darkness Lena wanted to infect her with now. 

"How could I be in love with you?" She cried, her arms raised skywards. "I don't know anything about you! Nothing about you is available to know! "

If Lena bit through her tongue now, the bitter taste in her mouth would be less. 

"You know more about me than anyone!" Lena shouted, incredulous and scrambling for something to cling too.

Kara's frowned deepened, the thin remaining logic in Lena wondering how many lines they were blowing past today. Her blue eyes seemed to darken to match the sky as she stared down at her. 

"I'm just your safe space to vent, Lena," Kara scolded, the accusation clear in her tone and words. "To tell all your problems without the threat of moving forward in any way."

Lena's lip curled, too many memories came rushing bursting on her tongue. 

"Because _you're_ moving forward, is that it?" It was meant to be sarcastic, but it came out more warning. A warning in vain.

Kara just continued to stare her down, her own face marred with frustration and anger.

"Yes, I'm trying to do something!" She looked Lena over vaguely, flitting eyes, before gesturing to the bench and then the area with a wave of her hand. "You just come and go as you please, disappearing when you want with no accountability, reappearing when you need your fix of patching up, all the while never wanting to see a professional because that would mean you're actively seeking help. I'm just… convenient for you, Lena."

Lena felt stung, flinching under the words and making herself even more furious for showcasing a reaction to them. Her fury held her upright, spine stiff as she snapped back. 

"Well maybe I'm just convenient for you too, Kara," the venom dripped off her tongue. "A way for you to be needed. A safe way. Some hallmark of someone even more damaged then you are."

Taunting, furious. Enraged. Lashing out with everything she had when inside, she felt like she was fifteen again. Alone in her room with her hands, covering her ears and screaming for everyone to go away. 

Kara didn't so much as twitch at her words, her face didn't harden, and she didn't pull away. But she didn't move forward either, and her eyes filled with more pity then Lena could bare. 

It was worse, somehow.

"Of course, you're not!" Her words stuttered into quiet. Like a creaked door in an empty house. "You're… you're…" 

Everything about Kara had always been so raw. So sincere and earnest. The way her eyes swam with brimming emotion now made Lena feel incredibly small.

"Lena, you're everything to me," Kara finally breathed out like realising slow air, but not a hint of hesitation. "You are. How could I not be in love with you? You're the most incredible person I've ever met. But you're not healthy. Being around you, loving you the way I do isn't healthy."

Lena looked up suddenly, catching Kara's eyes and holding her stare. Her lips twisted into a wry smile, but Lena could see the sadness hiding behind her eyes.

"You love me?"

Lena wanted to whisper it a few more times, just to taste the sound of it around in her mouth. She'd given her so much information. So many pieces of herself. Too much. Far too much. She'd used it, twisted it. Thrown it in Kara's face. She hadn't dared to really believe that…

This was the cruellest version of herself.

Kara snorted at her disbelief, and Lena flushed when she realised her mouth was gaping. She closed it with a snap as Kara began to pace furiously in front of her, rubbing her chin and muttering before she stopped and continued in a half shout. 

"Of course I do, you idiot! And I'm an idiot too for falling for someone who is so completely unavailable. And if you say now that you want us to be together, I'll know you're selfish too, because even a blind man could see that there's no room to be in a relationship with you."

Lena felt like she had been slapped. The faint elation at the honest confession of Kara's love clashed with all the ugliness of everything that rotted in her heart. Guilt. Sorrow. Confusion. 

All she had left was hurt. The only thing that wasn't muddled.

"Well, I'm sorry that my wife is dead, ok?" Her words measured and tone clipped, but her body flooded with it. "I'm sorry that she died and it's not convenient for you."

"Don't you dare say that to me," Kara hissed through her teeth, her eyes brimming with tears and fury now. A threat. 

Everything about her was a threat, and this was all so wrong. But her words cracked like lightning down Lena's spine. Burning through her nervous system. Jump starting every feeling. 

"Lena, nobody is more aware than me how much you loved herself." Kara held her hands to her chest. In response, Lena's arms drew in closer, an aggressively protective shield. 

"If I could bring her back for you, I would. I love you so much that I would bring her back for you just so that you could be happy." 

Lena shrank, every word hitting home like a whirlwind on every side. Nowhere to run. Nowhere left to breathe. Kara wouldn't let her escape, the truths that she believed captivating and holding Lena rooted from her navel to the ground. Standing above her, Lena could only stare and realise that the anger in her eyes wasn't at her, but for her. 

"But the thing that's stopping you from being happy isn't her being dead. It's you. You're in love with your own misery."

Lena couldn't take it anymore. She closed her eyes. If Kara had shouted it in her face, it would have hurt less. If she'd said it hatefully, it would have hurt less. Lena was a sinking ship for so long, only to be pulled to a halt with the ropes Kara had thrown her. But the way she was looking at her now, with everything she'd said, the ropes had been cut, and the slow slide beneath the water had morphed into a rush. 

Drowned beneath the storm.

She opened her eyes.

"Fuck you."

Kara frowned, baleful and full of frustrated anger. She looked like she wanted to fly off, to leave this conversation and everything it entailed behind, but was forcing herself to stand still under the weight of it.

"Lena, you don't deserve what you're putting yourself through," Kara answered, Lena's vehemence rolling off of her, sounding like she was speaking underwater. "I think you need to give yourself a break; otherwise, this is going to be your life. Take care of yourself."

Lena had learned the truth that the path away from happiness cursed and blessed equally. And she found herself wondering why, out of all the people in all the world she could ever have loved, she had to fall in love with someone who was taken away from her. Why had she fallen in love again when she was only half-alive. 

It hurt so much, Lena wanted to fall asleep and never wake up.

All she could do was turn around and walk away as the sky finally cracked, the rain finally fell. 

Ready to disappear into the earth. 

* * *

Lena had nightmares now. Nightmares that she was drowning, and as fast as she swam to the surface, it kept rising out of her grasp, the sheen between the water and air a fingers length away. She dreamt about wolves chasing her in dark forests that stole her face when they caught her. She dreamt about Sam, rail-thin and reaching for her for help. She dreamt of Lex, lips pulled back over his teeth in a feral grin. Lena saw his lips moving, knew there were more meaningless words filling up the space, but she couldn't hear them. Instead, she saw Sam's eyes, Kara's and her own, all missing some vital spark, and heard the rush of blood driven by a heart pounding so hard that she could feel it vibrating through her.

In her dream, she launched herself at him, her arm drawn back. Letting her momentum carry through the punch and then further, driving him down to the floor. Lena followed him, some part of her pleased with the sharp crack, the cry of pain, and the spurt of bright red blood flowing from his nose. The larger part of her, the part that could think of nothing but the way whatever he'd done had shredded through everything. Then the blood was water again, and once again, she was drowning.

Drowning and drowning until hands were around her throat, pressing her back and lips burning against her skin. With a grin sharper, crueller, then Lena had ever seen on her face, Kara was the one kissing her again and again, and Lena didn't fight it. She relaxed into it, let it happen, because there was nothing to be gained by fighting. She'd only hurt herself. It was angry and hateful and empty. 

Kara had always been so careful with her anger, Lena knew. Her anger was destructive to an order of magnitude greater than what the people and things around her could absorb. It broke things, incinerated things, left smoking craters and mangled ruins in its wake. It wasn't human. 

The burning around her throat, the pain intensified, boiling her. Higher and higher and higher. In the low light of her dream, this Kara seemed both wholly present and yet somehow absent, with anger and desire and keen focus fighting against a murky, vast void. 

_You ruin everything you touch_.

The words were snarled, pinning Lena in place tighter than her burning touch with their implacability. It was that shocked focus that allowed her to see the loathing spreading across Kara's face in a pattern like shattered glass. Lena had to turn away. It all burned bright before disappearing as quickly, and the inferno finally ended, replaced by the cool, soft wind. And when Lena turned back it wasn't Kara, but Sam, her face so close as her fingers weaved gently through Lena's hair.

_This is a dream_

It was a thought translated from Sam's dark eyes to Lena's, but it made Lena want to cry. 

Sam's face was so real, so alive in the filtered moonlight through the windows. But she was so cold. Blue with it, her breath visible in the air.

"Then it's a good dream," Lena replied, her voice soft with forced entreaty. 

She didn't want her to go. She knew it wasn't real, but she didn't want her to go. 

Sam smiled at the words, her fingers dropping from Lena's hair and touched Lena's lips lightly. 

_It's ok to let go._

Lena woke up at three am every morning, unable to move. Facedown on her pillow, panicked, close to hyperventilating, and locked in a silent scream. Terrified that someone was trying to smother her in her sleep.

Figures lurked in the corners of her room, shadowy and whisper-thin with distorted voices mumbling of lingering threat, but she couldn't understand what they were saying. And after what felt like hours, though it probably was no more than a minute or two, she began regaining feeling in her arms and was able to pull herself over onto her back to look around the room, but by then the figure was gone. Her sleep cycle was broken up intermittently, sweat drying on her skin, Lena could only sit on the edge of her mattress, head in her hands with the tangled sheets still wrapped around her waist. 

Lena wished her life could play out like a pantomime of domesticity, of the partnership she never thought she'd be able to have one day. Perfect jobs and a perfect apartment and evenings spent with heads bowed close, solving each other's problems in fond murmurs with the one she loved. It would all be soft touches, and gentle light and a normal family with nobody carrying the weight of a million scars on their souls. Consumed in each other's worlds. It was ridiculous, laughable. She existed in a self-contained world of depression and apathy. 

Sometimes, when she wakes up like this, she swore she could still feel the weight of Sam in her bed, sleeping in and burrowing into the sheets the way she always did when she didn't want to wake. She always looks to the corner of her room then, lit up by though's same flashes of lighting, and wished that the lumpiness shadows really were a person. Not a dark spectre, but something to watch over her. Sometimes, it's her birth mother, or Lex as a boy, and she's four years old in some field playing with flowers. Sometimes, it's Kara, smiling her smallest smile, her mouth closed, sorrowful, and Lena tries to move her lips. 

Tries to say, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.

They always blur into shreds of smoke when she opens her eyes properly, dissolving into murmured smoke of dreams, and then she's left with empty sheets, empty corners, and the same cavernous hole in her chest. Figments of a different life she can no more occupy than her own skin, as drowned as youth, as heartbreak.

"No," Lena answered her ghosts, words cracked in a hoarse whisper, louder than the lightning racing across the sky, because of course storm season had hit National City. "It's not." 

* * *

Mourning can't be conducted on a schedule. The gapping loss of death reached very far, very fast and settled just as slowly. Minutes, days, years past and Lena even her effort to scrub out the corners of her heart with Clorox, she still felt the intangible gaps of Sam. Like crawling out of a bombed building, choking on the ash and dust of it with splinters under her fingernails as if surfing was a day by day vestment of crawling out if the coffin she'd put herself in. So many scars and wounds that remained. Things that knowing and being with Kara had helped to nurture, teaching her that she still had life inside of her. 

She feels that new loss now, fractured and shattered over the old all over again. How it could hurt so much from just an argument. From an ending, a hateful one, but at least the participants were still alive. She could feel this one down the marrow of her bones, in the predawn light and the mirror of the bathroom as she just let the steam of hot water rise and rise and rise. 

Grief and time are inevitably linked. The same patterns playing out again and again. Even if they seemed new and interesting now. The initial anger she had felt turned to sadness, and now it had become something else, almost a dullness of sorts. Even though she was constantly in motion, it seemed as if nothing special ever happened to her anymore. Each day seemed exactly like the last, and Lena had trouble differentiating among them. She couldn't concentrate, couldn't eat, sometimes she struggled to even breathe.

For the once in her life, Lena took time off work. Spending her days holed up alone in her apartment, trying to scramble herself into something presentable for the times that Ruby was home. Though if she was honest, her daughter seemed to be avoiding her too. Considering that she felt, and must look, like a resurrected corpse most days, Lena couldn't really blame her. 

Being cooped up all of the time was starting to drive Lena mad. Her isolation was self-imposed, and her pacing around the apartment did next to nothing to relieve the brimming tension, worried feelings hanging over her head that made her anxious whenever she wasn't distracted.

This was different and worse and better and just different, then she had felt in the aftermath of Sam's death. Because she was still in the aftermath of that, and now she was in the aftermath of… well, it couldn't even be called a breakup, could it? She and Kara weren't together, they were just spare parts of other bits of machinery that had gravitated. In her heart of hearts, though, Lena couldn't even label whatever they had been on convenience. The truth was, she didn't know how she was supposed to respond to this. Her whole body seemed to be falling apart under the weight of it. 

Suffering pathetically when she should be stronger than this. Bordering the line between insanity and loneliness. Nothing could stop the nightmares though, the haunting spectres of her own words. She'd been so wrapped up in fear and concern that she hadn't paid attention to the fact in the way it deserved. That's what the ruthless honesty of the dead of night was for. Turning the argument over and over in her mind, reliving it even when she wanted to do anything but that, deconstructing it and examining every aspect with as much detachment as she could muster, when she couldn't ignore it.

No life, not a real one. What did it say about her that the only thing holding her above water was a need to exist for Ruby? Nothing else had much purpose. She'd lost her identity to the consumption of grief for the life she had and the life she never could again. The dark circles under her eyes etched permanently into her skin as she tried to forget the rest of the world existed while she surrendered to the void of never talking to anyone ever again. But even as her cheek was pressed flat to her pillow at three in the afternoon, her neck slowly mangled by the locked position, just so she could stare mindlessly out her rain-splattered bedroom windows with little effort, Lena found herself wondering. 

Wondering how many more dimensions of herself she could destroy until the only thing left of her identity was a clump of basic functions.

Breathe. 

Sleep. 

Breathe. 

Sleep. 

* * *

_"We have a zero-tolerance for violence policy, Ms Luthor."_

Those stern words echo fiercely in her head the whole silent ride home, Ruby staring out the window the entire time with an icepack pressed to her split lip. Truthfully, Lena was at a loss for what to say to her daughter. The call had been unexpected, to say the least. Breaking up her monotonous day and forcing her to venture out into the daylight. She knew she must have looked like a mess when she arrived at Ruby's principal's office, but she didn't really care. Her eyes were only on her daughter, even as the stern-faced teacher had droned on and on about rules and suspensions, Lena couldn't find it in her to care all the much beyond her daughter's safety. 

Finally, after what felt like an age, they entered the apartment, and it was only when the door locked behind them with a click that Lena felt safe enough to speak. 

"What happened?" She asked quietly, her eyes on the teenager's back as she walked away from her, ready to slink into her room.

At her words though, Ruby stopped, even though she didn't turn.

"Didn't they tell you?"

The distance between them was marked by more than just feet, and the apartment was so quiet. And even though it was new for them, and Sam had never lived in this place, Lena could feel the ghost of her at her side as well as Ruby's. 

"I want you to tell me."

Ruby turned to face her now, her eyes a million years older then she was. But Lena could see the anger there. The bitterness. It clawed at Lena's heart.

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Ruby, we have to," Lena breathed, hesitating a step forward, but stopped when Ruby threw up her hand as if to block her from afar.

"No, we don't!" The snap cracked across the room, Lena blinking under the volume, but altogether not too surprised. "Just like we don't talk about everything else. Why does it even matter, anyway? It was a fight, big deal. I know you got into plenty of fights when you were my age."

Lena sighed and rubbed the back of her neck.

"That doesn't make it ok," she answered mutedly. "Ruby, I just want to understand."

At her words, Ruby let out a strangled cry and with a half shout, threw the bag of ice across the room, hitting the floor with a harsh screech. Tears filled her eyes now, and Lena startled to realise how bloodshot they were, how exhausted and hollow. How had she missed that?

"Well, just stop!"

It was a harsh scream, and it crashed louder than the ice, full of pain and resentment. All of which Lena recognised too well. She had a choice here, and now, she felt as if she and Ruby were suddenly at a knife's edge and she hadn't even realised. She could back off, give her room to breathe, room to decompress and handle it herself, or she could push forward. Lena knew which one she would have preferred if she was in Ruby's shoes, but the thought of turning away from this made guilt churn in her stomach. 

Instead, she cleared her throat and stared resolutely forward, jaw taut. 

"No," she blinked past the stinging in her own eyes, cursing herself for her inability to remain stoic anymore. "I won't stop. Because you're my daughter, and I love you."

She didn't say it enough. She put it in her actions, that's what Lena had always told herself, but sometimes people needed to hear it out loud. Needed to hold onto the words as burning proof. 

Ruby's face twisted at the words and she turned her eyes down to the floor as if she were ashamed.

"It was about you, ok?" She admitted, the words slipping through her lips like leaking water. "About your family and you and Mom and all of it."

Lena closed her eyes, pained. 

How could she have missed all to this?

"Ruby," Lena interjected. "It's wasn't your fault."

She didn't even really know what it was, but she knew that. Nothing was Ruby's fault. Something corrosive within her thrashed violently. Something bitter and cruel wanted to lash herself. 

_Hypocrite._

"Is that what you tell yourself?" Ruby remarked dryly, her eyes heavy with scepticism, looking more burdened and harangued then Lena felt. 

Lena missed the days when Ruby's problems were as simply solved as buying her a colouring book or taking her to the aquarium. When the weight of all she had lost and all she had inherited through Lena, wasn't even a possibility. Lena wonders if Sam would have given her a shot if they had met after Lex had gone off the rails instead of before. If loving her would be worth the hell she'd be putting her daughter through by associating with a Luthor. 

Lena should have been more invested. She should have pushed more to understand. What it must be like to be Ruby. A teenager with a dead mom and another that's not only a cesspool of depressive grief but a sister to the most notorious criminal in the country. Lena's problems could never measure up. 

Maybe Ruby saw it in her eyes, maybe this whole time she'd been the one protecting Lena when it should have been the other way around, but the scepticism faded into something darker. More haunted.

"It's… It was just a girl stirring shit," she tried to brush off, rubbing her arms self-consciously. "She threw the first punch, and before I could even think, Supergirl was there, breaking it up."

That shocked Lena, bringing her head back above the well she was throwing herself down.

"What?" She asked, stunned.

Ruby shrugged, looking both annoyed and embarrassed.

"I mean, yeah, how often does Supergirl show up to break up school fights, but yeah, she was there. Smoothed it over with the principal, got me an icepack. I know you two work together, but I honestly didn't think her job covered bully patrol."

Lena was so greedy. Soaking up the kindness and sweet smiles, the soothing balm that Kara's presence offered in her life. So incredibly sled-indulgent wanting something to cling onto by her fingernails. Something good and pure and kind in the darkness she'd found herself in, cold and afraid and shivering. And it had all come tumbling down so horribly, but Kara still cared. Because no matter how illogical, and therefore normal for Lena, it would be to justify Kara appearing in Ruby's hour of need, what it really meant was that Kara still cared. And no matter what she felt about Lena now, she cared about Ruby. 

Lena had learnt long ago how much other people really make up all of who you are. How much of them is a part of you, though, she only truly be felt when they're gone. How their forms and tics and the way that they breathed can warp anything from the rhythm of your own heart to your favourite colour down to your taste in breakfast cereal. They'd become such an inseparable part of you that even though their loss is like someone carved a piece of your soul out with a dull ice-cream scoop, they still live in you. In all the small and big actions you make and do. Looking at Ruby, solitary and angry with resentment and loss balled up like a tight bunch of clothes in they're apartment, Lena wonders if she's been deluding herself this whole time thinking that her daughter's learned how to untangle the pulse of her own heart with that of the mother she'd lost. 

"I'm sorry that you didn't get more of a childhood," she said, trying and failing to stop her voice from cracking. "I'm sorry that this happened to you. Ruby, I'm-"

For the second time, Ruby's face flooded with rage.

"Just stop!" She shouted, cutting Lena off. "God. You never even… never ask me how I'm doing. And then you just assume!"

Lena could see it in her eyes as well as her words. The accusations and fear. Ruby wasn't stupid, and children were observant at the best of times. Lena's catalogue of sadness and grief was long and drawn out across every page since it was just the two of them, and Lena had never known what to say. How to explain. How to deal. So she'd just done what she could, patching the leaks and relying upon the self-reliance Ruby constantly projected. And she'd failed. 

"I wish I could talk your mother about getting over her," she finally whispered. "When you love somebody as much as I loved your Mom, you can never get away from them no matter where you go. Physically. Emotionally. They're always here. It only comes once in a lifetime, and I can't let go."

Her hands were shaking by the time she'd finished, and she had to bit her cheek to stop herself from crying. Ruby just kept looking at her with anger boiling behind her eyes.

"That's what you want, it's not what I want!" She yelled back, this time making Lena flinch. "I don't want to be stuck forever. I loved Mom, and I miss her like crazy, and I'm grieving, but I don't want my life to stop. I don't want to lose another parent."

Lena gasped, reaching out.

"Ruby, you haven't lost me, I'm right here-"

"Are you?" Ruby cut over her, backing away. "Are you really?"

Lena didn't answer, couldn't, and the disgust in Ruby's eyes made her feel smaller than an insect. Before the ugly silence could linger too long, Ruby scoffed and stormed off to her room, and Lena was left rooted to the spot, lost in the dark world of her own making and only pulled away by the buzzing in her pocket.

The name that flashed on the screen, causing her to answer straight away. 

_"Lena, it's Supergirl."_

Another lead weight in her heart.

* * *

Kara cut an impressive figure, even the faint light of the red sun lamps. Carved from stone, as though a real breeze still rippled her cape and her hair tangled with it. How someone recently poisoned with Kryptonite and unconscious could look so good, Lena didn't know. Maybe there was something to be said about an alien complexion.

"Don't you dare die," Lena bit out, hunched by her side already for a silent hour after a frantic scramble to save Kara's life.

She was furious and more terrified then she had a right to be. From the moment she'd gotten the call till now, and it ate at her that she couldn't do anything more than she already had. Seeing Kara now, after well over a month of no-contact and self-imposed isolation, made Lena want to cry and scream and rage all over again. The DEO infirmary wasn't a hospital, but the sickbeds and the medical equipment put her on edge all the same. Another person she cared about near-death, except this time she could help. And she had, and the logical part of her brain knew that Kara was going to be ok, but the terror still stayed. The care. 

The only sounds that broke up the silence was Kara's slow breathing, the faint hum of the sun lamps and the low din of noise beyond the sound-proof glass room, but it wasn't enough to fill it. 

Lena looked at Kara now and wondered why it all had to go so wrong between them. Why she had to ruin everything she touched. Why it was always the best people, the kindest and the gentlest who got hurt when there were so many far more deserving. Why she was still so angry even though Kara didn't deserve it.

"I don't know what the fuck is wrong with me," the words bleed out of her cracked lips. "I know if I carry on like this, people are going to get hurt. You already have been." 

And Ruby, she thought. And Kara had been there too when Lena couldn't. Kara was always there. 

She reached out, unclenching the stiffness in her fingers, and traced the soft fabric of Kara's cape between her fingers. In another life, she would have marvelled at the alien weave, wondered at how it was created, but today Kara's links to the stars were so much less important than the one's she had to her. 

"Me being fucked up isn't good enough anymore," Lena admitted brokenly. "I'm just letting myself off the hook again and again. I'm like this still on purpose now. I know what I'm doing, even though I don't even know what I'm fighting anymore. There's no enemy in this story." 

Here, now, was the most open she had felt in years; and she knew it was only because Kara was unconscious. There was a pure honesty here that had long since escaped her.

"What I said to you… It was the worst thing I've ever done," she cried, tears trickling down her cheeks as her chin trembled. "I'm in pain all the time and talked to you like that because it made me feel better for a split second. I know that other people are in pain as well, but I… I just wanted to be out of it for so long. Either live without it or die without it, whichever one came first, I chose that." 

The threads holding her here, she'd used them as an excuse. A reason to limp on. But Lena had never really wanted to heal the wounds. She wanted them to fester. A part of her sitting on the edge of the cliff, always waiting until she could fall off. There could have been nothing more jarring then today to realise how truly and deeply, she didn't want to die. She didn't want to lose her daughter. She didn't want to lose Kara. 

She didn't want to lose herself.

"I'm accountable for my actions," she whispered. "I was jealous. I was jealous because I didn't want you to move forward with your life without me next to you. And I'm a coward for only being able to say this to you know while you can't hear me. I'm so sorry."

Lena wasn't good with apologies. Like so much else. But where she was transparent, Kara was light. The crevices and cracks of her soul made her want to weep under the strain. Lena didn't know how it was possible to feel so utterly invisible without her. Lena's whole soul thrummed with the nothingness that Kara filled with everything, and she can't imagine losing her. The realisation settled, like a weight dropped in water that had finally hit bottom. The world was still dark, cold and cruel, but it was oh so beautiful too. Peeking around the corners and walking the edges of rooms. Theirs always was a weird and improbable friendship. It shouldn't make sense at all, and yet it made the most sense of all. Kara was a force in her life. The person that had breathed it back in through death and the things that had left her, but had also returned like a guarded gift. After all, stars still existed in daylight even if you can't see them. 

If Kara had taught her anything, it was that loneliness was better dealt with in pairs. 

It was all she could manage now not to fall apart into wracking sobs, and although every fibre of her being wanted to stay, Lena stood and left the room with one final, long and lingering glance at Kara's unburdened face.

Waiting by the elevator to take her back to the ground floor, Lena was stopped from entering by a deep voice calling for her.

Turning, she held a hand in the gap to keep the doors open but waited until J'onn stood next to her, looking even more exhausted then she felt. Lena could only imagine how difficult it must be for him to see Kara almost die. Lena knew that the losses in his life surmounted even her own, and yet he had mastered which she hadn't. The art of moving on. 

No wonder she always felt a little uncertain under his knowing eye. 

But now, he just looked at her with deep gratitude. It made Lena even more uncomfortable.

"Thank you, Lena."

She clenched her teeth at the deep rumble, and although she knew it was sincere, it felt entirely undeserved.

"You don't have to thank me, Director," she murmured.

If the man was surprised by her words, he didn't show it. Something akin to understanding filled his eyes instead. After a slight pause, he spoke again in an even gentler voice.

"No, you don't understand. When her sister died, Kara became… reckless. Missions without backup, losing her job… She withdrew from her friends. Her family. But lately, well… she's started smiling again. Laughing. A large part of that I have not doubt is due to you."

It was kind, it was well-meant. It was so undeserved because Kara deserved so much better than her.

"Call me if you need anything," was all she managed in turn, dropping her hand and letting the doors slide closed.

* * *

The coffee pot dripped.

You'd think, being one of the highest-paid psychologists in National City, one would have a coffee pot that didn't intermittently drip and hiss, annoying the patients that were paying an excessive amount of money to see you. 

But no. Not the case, apparently.

"You seem uncomfortable."

Lena resisted the urge to roll her eyes at the asinine question. How exactly was she supposed to feel sitting across from a stranger who'd been observing her silently for the past few minutes?

"I am," she answered shortly, wincing at her own tone. "Therapy is very… The idea of it is complicated for me."

Lena didn't know why this room bothered her so much. It was too…. clean. Maybe that was it. Or it was the gaudily coloured chair she was sitting on. Or perhaps it was because she really had so many other places she could be right now that weren't here. She could be in bed. She should be at work. Anything else. 

What was she doing?

The woman across from her just watched her in a way that made Lena want to drum her fingers on her knee.

She resisted the urge.

"You mentioned when you made this appointment that your daughter attends therapy. Is the idea of her in counselling difficult for you too?"

Lena scowled.

"No," she snapped harshly. "Of course not. Ruby is everything to me, her health is all the matters."

The older woman arched an eyebrow.

"But yours doesn't?"

Lena wanted to groan. She should have. Mumbo jumbo all digging into her words… Which was precisely why she had made an appointment here. To get help.

"No," she answered, pregnant pause notwithstanding. "I'm just… I'm cautious by nature."

Kara's face, Ruby's face, Sam's face. They all blurred in her mind along with a scorning voice that sounded suspiciously like Lillian's underneath it all. 

_Weak._

Lena wished she could sock the old bat.

"You also mentioned on the phone that you've been having suicidal thoughts since the death of your wife."

Lena let out a heavy breath through her nose.

"Had," Lena shattered. "Had suicidal thoughts."

The lingered in the back of her mind. In the past, like an ill-gotten memory. Lena had a feeling that it would leave a stain on her forever. The lowest parts of your life never really left you. 

"Not anymore?"

She shook her head.

Lena had made a list in the week leading up to this. A list of every symptom, every problem. The nightmares and the daymares and the way Ruby now seemed adamant on avoiding her. It was bullet-pointed and precise and researched, but still, Lena hadn't brought it today because it didn't feel- 

"I'm depressed," Lena answered gruffly. "And it's affecting… my personal relationships."

Don't be resistant, that's what she had recited in her head leading up to this. 

Don't be resistant.

"With your daughter?"

Ruby's face.

"Yes."

Kara's face.

"With the rest of your family?"

Lena scowled, her teeth grinding.

"Well, my brother's in jail after trying to take over the world and kill Superman, and my adoptive mother thinks that I'm the greatest disappointment to the human race since the invention of reality TV."

The sarcasm didn't even make the woman blink, and Lena couldn't decide if her judgement should be to like that or hate it.

"Friends?"

Kara's face again.

"One." The long pause before she answered almost making the word boom around the room. "But we recently had a falling out."

"Why?"

Lena's lips pursed, and she scratched her mind for a way to answer. 

"It was an unconventional friendship. We met infrequently, she'd just lost her sister too. Bonded through grief, I guess."

"That doesn't answer my question."

She could feel it. Curse Kara for doing this to her, making all her emotions raw and brimming. They should've just stayed buried deep inside and left to decay.

"She was trying to move forward with her life," Lena answered tightly. "I got upset that I wasn't… aren't able too. I accused her of being in love with me."

The answer didn't seem to throw the woman off.

"Is she?"

Lena pulled a face.

"I don't know! She said so, but I don't know."

Too much. All of it. A gigantic, ridiculous mess that never should have ever happened. She'd taken whatever Kara had given her, had been given her and dragged it through the mud. Kara had said as much that she loved her, but she also said that it was unhealthy. Which could only mean that Lena was bad for her. Being around Lena was bad for everyone, it seemed. She turned to stare out the window of the office and into the rain, wondering when the downpour would stop this time, the silence lingering until she felt a nudge on her arm to get her attention. The older woman, kind smile and all holding out a cup to Lena to take. Lena hadn't even realised that she had gotten up to pout it, but her manners kicked in, and she took it with a murmur of her thanks, steam curling from the surface of the dark liquid as she stared down at it.

"Are you in love with her?"

It was the same question Lena had been asking herself in so many ways since the first time they met. How could she, though? How could she love Kara? Her only frame of reference was Sam, and she didn't even want to start there. Loving Sam, losing her, had been all-consuming. Burning through everything she was and everything she had. She'd given and lost her whole heart. She'd lost herself and the fact that she might love Kara, that Kara was the one who'd helped gather the pieces again, well it was overwhelming. Complicated. Horrifying. Wonderful. 

Everything and nothing all at once, and hell if it didn't hurt.

"That's a complicated question." She finally answered, shrugging half-heartedly, Lena's brows pulling together in a frown.

"Why?"

A mirthless laugh escaped her without volition. 

"Well, it'd be a complicated answer."

The other woman just continued to stare at her, clearly not accepting Lena's answer. After a few threaded seconds, Lena let out a sigh and felt her shoulders relax.

"I don't have the luxury of being in love," she answered again. Softer. "There's a lot of factors to worry about. Variables."

"Which are?"

Lena should check her watch, surely they only had an hour?

"For one, the fact that I'm depressed," she rattled thinly, a sardonic twist to her mouth. "I'm not bringing a lot to the table with that. I'm still… I love my wife. I don't have room for more. I should be focusing on my daughter, on my company."

On literally anything else that could even have the vaguest prospect of being productive. She needed this to get better so she could feel the sun on her skin and breathe again. Not so she could frolic down a flight of fancy. An extremely tumultuous and tempting flight. 

"Not on being happy?"

Lena could actually remember the last time somebody had asked if she was happy, let alone when she really had been. With Sam, of course though. Before she got sick. Just before.

"I was lucky," she said hollowly. "I had the love of my life, and I loved her, and she loved me, and we had a great life together. Most people don't get that, not once let alone…"

It was a dream, a wish. But it wasn't for her. It was childish to hope. 

The psychologist observed her across the table, looking both disarmingly intent and sanguine at the same time. Lena's heart started to hammer in her chest for some strange reason, she felt the pulse of it in her ears and all the way down to her fingertips.

"What do you want, Lena?" The other woman lightly replied, her lips curled in a slight smile as her eyes crinkled at the corners. Soft and gentle. 

Lena tried to relax under it. Wanted to let herself go. Tried, and failed. 

"I want to get better." All she could do was curl her fingers like claws in her lap, nails digging into the smooth skin of her palms. "Whatever the hell that means. I'm sick of being miserable."

It was true enough. In fact, it was the most honest thing she felt. Whether or not being happy for herself of for someone else was… irrelevant.

"Being happy is a good goal," The other woman's smile grew, and she reached for a writing pad and pen. "All we have to do is figure out how to get you from where you are, to happy."

Lena felt so flat, so exhausted suddenly, even from the little she had said, the dawning prospect of whatever that would talk seemed so momentous she needed a second to draw some strength.

"That easy, huh?" She managed, almost shyly.

The psychologist nodded, half shrugged with a quirked eyebrow and a spark in her eyes that reminded Lena achingly of someone else.

"I doubt anything you've ever wanted to accomplish has been easy, Lena. Doesn't mean you shouldn't try, does it?"

She was right, but the coffee pot still dripped.

* * *

Funny. So many months had passed now since she had first visited, and yet it was only now really occurring to her that in all that time, she had never actually visited alone. Kara had, from the very first accidental meeting, been right by her side. 

Sitting alone on this bench now, not on a Tuesday, upon suggestion with the gentle mist of the rain hitting her hair and dampening the collar of her raincoat, Lena wondered if it had really been the best idea. It had taken three months of therapy to get her to the point where she even wanted to do this again. Still, here she was back with absolutely nothing to do except stare, sit and think. 

Hadn't she been doing that enough?

Kara was so, active in her grief. Her processing of it anyway. In all the ways that Lena wasn't. Lena's eyes slid from her wife's name to that of Alex Danvers and found herself wondering just what kind of conversation Kara would be having with her sister right now instead. Would she talk about Lena? Had she already? And in Kara's mind, had her sister told her that Lena was absolutely the worst thing to come into her life since Big Belly Burger introduced it's Giant Mega-Shake. 

No, that would be too kind. 

Lena had seen enough photos and heard enough descriptions, she knew that Alex had carried herself with confidence and fire and would have been the first to warn Lena away. 

Lena wished she could find even a sliver of belief in her heart that somehow Alex, Sam and anyone dead and lost could hear her. Could know that she was trying something. Trying to be unburned. 

Exhumed. 

Lena found herself whispering aloud. 

"I wonder if you would hate me now."

She tried to imagine an answer in her head. Tried to think of what Sam would say, but she only heard silence. 

"I've been told that this isn't necessarily… unhealthy. To cope. To help me process. It's not like I haven't accepted that you're dead, though. It's still hard. It comes in waves. I see you in my dreams. I hear you when I put on music. I see you in Ruby. You were too good, too kind. And I couldn't save you. I'm sorry."

It didn't feel overly cathartic. Especially since there were no answers. But Lena supposed, in a way, she felt a bit lighter. Enough to slump a little and allow the sound of the rain to soothe instead of hurt.

"Hey…"

It was a soft call, and so eerily reminiscent of the first time they'd met, Lena could only allow a smile to touch her lips. Turning to look at Kara, hovering almost over the wet grass, Lena briefly wondered if somehow Kara was here for her. Or if maybe, she was actually here on a not Tuesday in an effort to avoid her. 

Lena had so many things she wanted to say. 

Kara looked different, healthy, which brought some relief to the anxiety that had remained in Lena's chest ever since she had been poisoned. Not that Lena hadn't known she would recover, but… Still, the worry had remained. 

Along with everything else.

_Everything else_ managed to knock Lena's breath out of her lungs. 

"Hey," she finally answered quietly, relaxation breaking away to nerves. 

Kara eyed her cautiously, and the guilt that was gnawing at Lena ate faster than before. 

"How are you feeling?" Kara asked after a pause.

Lena should be asking her that, not the other way around. 

"Better," Lena answered, trying not to sound overly eager. "Yeah. Much. I'm… in therapy now."

Kara arched an eyebrow, and Lena hoped that the look that flickered in her eyes was a good one.

"Yeah? Expensive and useless?"

Lena let out a chuckle. It was light. A little well-worn. Creased.

"Halfway decent."

Kara nodded, looking away across the horizon. Lena watched her silently, the way the soft rain dampened her hair, but it didn't look like it bothered her. Realising that she didn't have any intention of sitting, Lena stood up instead, the action redrawing Kara's attention.

"You look good," Lena breathed quietly with a tight smile.

Kara's eyes traced her face for a long while.

"So do you."

Lena stepped closer, stopping only when she saw Kara's fingertips start to dig into the fabric of her jacket at the action. 

She wasn't good at this. She was learning, trying, but she'd never been good at it. Kara's eyes were too intense, the things she'd said last time they were here too cutting. 

But she had to try.

When Kara stayed silent, she chanced another step forward. Her hand came up, fingers inches away from resting on Kara's forearm when Kara moved out of her reach. Lena's hand dropped.

"I'm sorry, about last time. I was-"

Kara cut her off with a wave of her hand. 

"No, no, you don't have to apologise for that. Never." Her words were soft, honest, but Lena could see something was troubling her. "But I'm sorry too."

Lena's words hesitated on her tongue, a jumble of uncertainty threatening to spill out in a ramble. It was if everything had shifted between them now. She could almost feel it in the air. She, wanting to ramble, and Kara waiting in silence. There was just so much she wanted to say. 

In the struggle for it, something escaped her in a half strangle.

"Kara, the thing is… I'm…"

It died a death between them, and sudden sympathy flooded Kara's face, It grounded her features her arms dropped to her sides. 

"It's ok," she reassured, the memory of a smile on her lips. "It's ok."

Lena looked at Kara now. Really looked at her in an effort to understand. She knew her likes and dislikes, habits and mannerisms, the crucial events of her life. What she feared and what she lost and most importantly, what she believed in. How she lived. Who she was. But there was so much more that she didn't know, so much pressed up against a wall now. Kara had said she loved her, and that frightened Lena. But not as much as Kara said, and honestly so, that it wasn't enough. 

"No. No, it's not ok," Lena spoke, trying to inject some strength into her voice, but failing miserably. I never expected to feel this way with anyone else. And I was wondering if you wanted to… try… at something." 

_Something._

God, she was an idiot. 

"I'm not totally falling apart at the seams," she finished weakly, feeling decidedly pathetic and a little nauseated at whatever that attempt had been. She didn't even know why she'd said it. Love and loss combined with guilt, maybe? And the overwhelming need not to let Kara slip through her fingers. 

The other woman just watched her bumble along, and Lena felt heat creep up the back of her neck, wondering if what she'd said sounded as desperate as it felt. Kara didn't seem overwhelmed with charm, but neither was she outright scoffing. In fact, the sadness in her eyes seemed to double in size, as if she could see right through Lena and her motivations better then she did.

"I don't know if it's the right thing right now."

Lena didn't know what she had been expecting would be the response, but it hadn't been the almost physical desire to fall. Kara's words felt like a hole punched through her heart and all the while, she just kept staring, gauging Lena's reaction. 

"Ok," Lena managed. "Yep."

For a moment, Kara met her gaze with unflinching focus. The pity dropping away under intensity.

"You're the saddest person I've ever met."

Something curdled in Lena's chest at the rather raw assessment.

"Yep, thanks," she husked, unsure if she was supposed to be defensive or agree, but definitely feeling the combination of both. 

Kara seemed to be on a roll now, finally giving herself permission to speak. 

"And you did it to yourself. Turned your heart into stone, so you didn't have to feel anything because it was just too much. Too painful." 

Lena's eyes dropped to the ground, only to have a finger pressed underneath her chin to draw them back up into Kara's burning gaze.

"But you still make me laugh, and you make me smile," Kara continued, her eyes shimmering as her hand dropped. "And the way you love your daughter…and the fact that you work so hard…. Lena, I've never been judging you or tried to trip you into something. This is coming from a place of total humility, with the acknowledgment that my life is a day by day experiment in terrible decisions, you're really messed up."

Lena laughed, feeling emotional and teary.

"And that _is_ a bad thing," she agreed.

"No!" Kara exclaimed in a rush. "No, of course not… Well… But… Lena, you're not ready for a relationship and I really, really like you. I don't want to compete for the place in your heart that you've still got reserved for your wife."

Lena was used to the feeling of heartbreak. It was a semi-constant state for the majority of her life before Sam and had been a remaining constant after. There wasn't much in the world that hadn't hurt her before, and she wasn't naive enough to think that she hadn't given as good as she'd gotten in some cases. The journey to this point had not been a pleasant ride. While a part of her was still fighting in her head and heart, telling her that she was an idiot, the louder part just eased and knew that Kara was probably right. And Kara deserved the world from someone. Someone who could give her their whole heart and everything in it, every day for as long as she had it. And that someone wasn't her. 

Lena reached out and tucked a damp lock of Kara's hair behind her ear, unable to stop herself. Raindrops misted on Kara's skin, the heat of it cooling them and turning to steam. And at the touch, Kara reached out too, tracing her cheek with a cooler hand, her thumb gently brushing the dots of rain off of Lena's skin as she gave her an understanding smile. Lena trembled at the feel of it, Kara's fingers softly stroking her. Then, leaning in closer, so close that her warm breath fanned across Lena's cheek, making her spine ripple with goosebumps, Kara cupped her face with an expression so broken, Lena struggled to breathe.

"I don't want to lose you," Lena whispered into the touch, reaching to brush away Kara's tears, voice hoarse. Her eyes were wide, mournful, and wet with their own tears. She was unfairly beautiful, she always had been, and Lena's heart ached with sudden, sharp anger for all that could be.

A flicker of surprise ran across Kara's face, a momentary look of panic, but she quickly composed her features.

For a long moment, Lena watched Kara struggle to find words. She wanted to memorise every line, every shadow. The face of the one she loved. Like a departing traveller unsure they would ever return. She watched the play of muscles and tendons as Kara swallowed and the ripple of her jaw as she bit down hard, trapping whatever she might have said behind her teeth. Lena wanted to press her fingers against the furrow creasing her brow and her downturned lips and forget she would ever be the cause of the sadness and regret in Kara's blue eyes. She wanted to rewind time, to have a tentative, nervous first kisses. She wanted the sound of the soft landings of Kara's boots on her balcony. She wanted shared time spent on a roof under the stars.

She wanted everything.

Kara's face cracked with it, giving Lena a too-bright smile, her eyes filled with mourned happiness. Her blue eyes solemn and searching her deep, looking for the truth behind the words.

"Then don't," she quietly murmured, a softness to her features as she smiled.

Kara said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. It felt like that to Lena. Inevitable. And exciting. And terrifying. She said it, and before Lena could answer, she was gone. A puff of air left behind and Lena's hand still held in the air and still warm from Kara's skin.

* * *

Lena hadn't been able to sit or stop pacing since she entered her psychologist's office today. Luckily, after a few months of treating her now, the other woman seemed to take her random actions as part and parcel. Hovering near the coffee pot briefly, her hand hesitating over the switch with the desire to turn it off, growling, before she turned and started pacing again.

"I've been a lot of things lately," she suddenly blurted off, still treading a path into the carpet. "Cold, selfish, self-centred. But I'm still alive. I'm still here." 

Lena stopped, shocked slightly by her own words, all the frantic energy drained out of her, and she found herself slumping into the chair opposite her psychologist and staring down her nose to her feet. 

"Every minute since she died up till now was just a waste of time," Lena murmured, feeling despondent. "Just a warm-up for… I don't know. I keep wondering if I'd never met Sam… If I'd never met her, married her, loved her… Would I have met Kara? I don't believe in destiny, but it just seems…" 

She sighed, looking up from her feet and back in the direction of the window with a frown. 

"If there is only one person for you, how can you know you've found them?" She questioned aloud. "Were they really the one for you, or do you only think they are? And then if your person dies and you fall in love with someone new, is this the person you were really meant to be with? If the two of them were side by side, were they both the one for you but you just happened to meet the first one first, or was the second person supposed to be first? Is everything just chance?" 

She doubted life had a plan for her, and if it did, it hadn't shared it with her thus far. Everything had become so fucking complicated.

"I haven't stopped loving Sam," Lena said resolutely. "I don't think I ever will. It wasn't a breakup. We didn't get a divorce. The love didn't just stop. It was hacked off because she died loving me. How can I expect anybody to compete with that? Kara was right… but how can I stop feeling what I do for her?"

She needed something, some hard-line, some answer to the questions she couldn't stop asking herself. Rolling Kara's face and Sam's over and over again in her mind. She needed to be given the ripcord to pull the parachute that would stop it.

Her psychologist didn't seem keen to follow along with her questions to the universe, instead watching her with slight amusement in her eyes.

"You can't leave everything to philosophical discussions, Lena," she answered simply. "You have to be proactive in your own life. Wondering at things you can't change won't create a new reality. You have to live in the present."

Lena groaned at the answer, rolling her neck back against the chair.

"But what does that mean?" She demanded. "How can I feel this way at the same time for both of them? I don't want to… cheat. Emotionally."

On Sam. On Kara. Jesus, at this point she'd be better just joining a nunnery and having done with it. She sighed again, pinching the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. 

"Do you feel like you're betraying Sam?"

The question knocked her. 

"No," she bit out sharply, but under the weight of her psychologist's knowing stare, her temper faltered, and she changed her answer. "I don't know."

There was a weighty pause.

"Did you ever discuss the prospect of a new relationship with your wife after she-"

"She tried," Lena cut in, her words like ash and her eyes gritty. "Once. It was about, opening my heart again and… I don't know."

It was _that_ conversation, the one that was about what to do after and of course Lena remembered it. It was burned into her mind like a brand, and whenever her thoughts lingered on it for too long all, it wasn't Sam's soft, understanding stare that she thought of. Or the way her hand, so thin and birdlike then, felt in her's. It was the guilt, the resolve, the demand she'd made of herself that there would never be anyone else. 

And Sam had just watched her, knowing exactly what was going through her mind. Knowing her so well. Maybe she'd even known that one day someone would come along that would make that promise about as worthless as a concrete parachute when now all she could do was feel. 

"She wanted me to be happy," Lena breathed out. "Move forward."

How could you explain something that you didn't even understand yourself? Lena couldn't even find the proper words. And that was only part of the problem. 

"The dead don't have unfinished business, Lena." 

The words drew her attention. The older woman's eyes were warm, and her tone gentle, though she spoke as if what she was saying was the most obvious thing in the world. 

"It's us, the people that are left behind. It's us that are unfinished."

A few seconds passed, then a minute, until a tear trailed down Lena's cheek.

* * *

She knocked gently on the open doorframe, hovering with a slight smile.

"Hey, can I come in?"

Ruby flipped a page in the full album she was holding, looking back over her shoulder from the bed she was sprawled over. A pillow tucked under her chin as she eyed Lena with an unreadable expression. 

"Yeah, I guess."

Lena swallowed the lump in her throat but tried to take it as a positive sign and stepped forward until she could sit and perch on the mattress too. Things had been tense between her and Ruby ever since the fight at school. And although the cut on Ruby's lip had long since healed, and Lena had made a far more active effort to hold conversations with her daughter, she knew that there was still a space between them filled with everything they had said to each other and everything they weren't. 

Lena struggled to find words even now, opting to look at the box and album of photos Ruby was looking at, picking up one of the loose ones on the quilt.

"Wow, you're looking through these, hey?"

It was them. All of them. Her and Sam and Ruby together and apart, but all happy and smiling and real. All the snaps of their lives together. Staring down at the photo she'd chosen, Lena was startled to realise that the sight of Sam's face didn't make her sad, or even longing filled. It actually caused a small bloom of happiness to light in her heart, as if Sam's smile and her eyes were reaching through time to reassure her. 

_It's ok to let go._

Ruby didn't acknowledge she had spoken, still thumbing through the album she held, but not quick enough for Lena not to see some of the pictures of Sam laughing in a white dress. 

Lena smiled, her eyes flickering to Ruby's face, trying to gauge her mood. 

"You know, when we were planning," she ventured in a light tone. "Your mom asked if you wanted to be the flower girl. But you'd decided that that wasn't good enough and you wanted to be the-"

"Maid of honour. For both of you. I remember."

She turned the page without another word, the next photo one of just Lena and Ruby. Lena remembered that day. It was within a month of Lena meeting Sam and it was the first time she'd born witness to Ruby having a tantrum because she wouldn't let her get her way. Sam had just watched her the whole time, with amusement and somewhat measuring eyes, even as Lena had flailed about in her attempts to calm the little girl down. Eventually, though, it had all ended well, with Lena prancing about the living room pretending to be a horse while Ruby held onto her back and charged evil imaginary dragons.

That was a good day. 

"I'm sorry if I'm mucking up this parenting thing." 

Her soft words drew Ruby's attention away from the book and toward her eyes. She lay still, a slight frown on her face, but she didn't interrupt as Lena continued.

"I've just, felt a little lost since your mom died and I'm never sure if I'm doing the right thing or the wrong thing." It was an honest admittance, though one that Lena had struggled with. "I was so young when my mother passed away, and Lillian was so… well, Lillian, that I'm afraid I've never really had a role model to follow in this parenthood thing. The only person I knew that really rocked at it was your mom, and I know that I'll never be her."

Ruby's frown deepened, and she scrambled up into a sitting position.

"I don't want you to be Mom."

"Ok," Lena answered after a pause. "Then what-"

"I just… you're so sad," Ruby whispered, looking down and away as if she were admitting a dark secret. "You think I don't see it, but I do. I've just, I don't want to bother you with all the stuff I'm doing all the time. You were so cool and happy and fun, but now you're just…"

She looked back up, her eyes glistening with tears.

"It's like you never want to spend time with me because it reminds you of her, and I just didn't want to make it worse."

Lena's heart broke for her daughter then and immediately pulled her into a hug. She tried to pour everything that she could into it, everything that she wanted to give to Ruby and everything she needed. All of Sam's gentleness, all of Kara's warmth and all of her own understanding. Ruby held her back tightly, her fingers clenching the back of her shirt, and Lena felt the small stain of wetness from tears in the crook of her neck quickly. 

"Ruby, you reminding me of your mother could and will _never_ be a bad thing," Lena whispered sharply in her daughter's ear. "Sure, I look at you, and I do see her. But that makes me happy, not sad. Because it means that a part of her is still here. But you're your own person, Mom's just a part of what makes up you."

Ruby's sniffing intensified and Lena rubbed her back and stroked her hair.

"You never want to talk about her. You never say her name. You're like a zombie most days."

Lena let her body sag slightly, her muscles loosening, but she still held her daughter close.

"I didn't know you wanted me to talk about her more," she admitted quietly.

She remembered when she'd asked if Ruby had wanted to visit her mother's grave, she'd said no, but Lena had never followed up. She hadn't followed up on a lot of things it seemed. She seemed the guilt that sprung up automatically, though. It wasn't productive. 

"But that doesn't mean I don't want to talk about her with you," Ruby answered, her voice shaky with emotion. "You're the only person in the world who loved her as much as me, and I want to talk about her with you."

She pulled back from Lena's arms now, and even though her face was tear-stained and red, something had shifted. Like the space between them had finally been breached. Lena smiled at that, feeling decidedly emotional herself, before looking back down at the photos spread about them. 

"You know, you have been better lately."

Lena arched an eyebrow at the happier tone.

"Maybe you're onto something with this therapy thing after all," she admitted with her own grin but had to find that she agreed. Something inside herself had shifted lately, coming back to her centre.

Ruby though, shook her head, a strange glint in her eyes.

"No, I mean yeah I think that's good, but I meant since you met Kara."

Lena stared at Ruby for a few seconds, before picking up another smaller album and clicked through it herself.

"Yeah, she's pretty cool, huh?"

"And nice, and funny," Ruby continued in a non-chalet voice, nudging Lena's shoulder with her's. "Pretty."

Lena didn't have to wonder hard where Ruby had picked up sarcastic deadpanning. But her so-called attempt at subtlety definitely came from Sam. 

"Hmm," was all she managed, brushing a bit of lint off her leg and frowning at a photo of her and Sam at a costume party. Surely she hadn't really thought she could pull off stiletto's that high?

"And she knows all the best places for takeout," Ruby continued in a ramble, Lena feeling the heat of the grin she was baring like the Cheshire cat. "And she kicks your butt playing Mario Cart."

Lena's resolve wavered, a soft smile growing on her lips.

"Yeah."

Ruby paused for breath but seemed to take Lena's smile as a sign.

"She left her coat here the last time she came. You should probably return it to her. Coat's like that don't come along every day, you know."

Lena eyed her funnily, her mouth quirking more.

"Hmm."

Ruby rolled her eyes dramatically.

"I mean, as far as coat's go," she drawled in an over-obvious, exaggerated voice. "It is pretty awesome."

"I got it," Lena conceded

"Most people get only one great coat in their lives," Ruby steamrolled. "It's pretty amazing if a second one comes along."

"Ok."

"That coat's not going to wait around forever-"

"Ruby, I get it," Lena cut over her, least her coat metaphors get even more ridiculous. Closing the photo album with a snap, she let out a sigh. "Why are you so concerned with this anyway?"

Her daughter was too smart for her own good, Lena decided, far too observant and growing up far too quickly. But even though she was smiling with amusement, at Lena's question, her eyes dimmed into something softer. 

"Cause I want you to be happy," she answered. "Mom'd want you to be happy too, you know."

Lena held her stare for a short while before she let out a sigh and rolled onto her back, staring up at the white of the ceiling. 

"I think I mucked that one up on my own already," she admitted dully, fingers splayed over the fabric. 

It was still so confusing. Maybe it would never stop. Wrapped up in deserves. She and Kara. 

"It can't be worse than that time you accidentally deleted Mom's final assignment," Ruby answered cheekily. "Or the time you lost me in the mall. Or that time you were late to your own party and Mom and had to wait there alone for two hours and didn't know anybody. Or when-"

"Ok, you've made your point." Lena dryly replied, her lips quirking up into a smile at the lighthearted teasing.

Snorting with laughter now, Ruby grinned playfully and rolled onto her back next to her, their shoulders pressed together now.

"I'm just saying, that you made mistakes with Mom and me," she continued in a gentler voice. "You didn't know everything automatically, and it took you a while to learn the ropes. The important thing is that you keep trying to be better. You stayed up with Mom all night and helped her rewrite her assignment. You found me at the mall. And you took three weeks so that we could go on a road trip, just us."

Lena remembered. She remembered it all. But somehow, when Ruby told it, it didn't seem bitter. It was less about what she'd lost and more about what they'd had. And the temptation of what she could have again. New and different, but again.

"You've come a long way since we first met, which I'll totally take full credit for," Ruby continued. "But you need to let go of your past so you can have a future."

Forgiveness was hard for Lena. She didn't do it well, at all. She usually existed on a one chance policy with everyone she met. Although it had served her well in some instances, it was a rather brutal way to live her life. And the thing that she'd always struggled most with, of course, was forgiving herself. 

Tilting her head slightly, the shadow from the light in Ruby's room seemed to cast patterns on the ceiling. Spirals within in spirals. Darkness within and without. Balanced and beautiful. 

As quick as lightning, the thing in her chest, the thing in her mind, the unknowable and knowable thing that had been rattling around like a quarter in a can finally clicked. And it all seemed so simple, and she sat up abruptly.

"You think you'll be ok on your own for a few hours?"

Ruby grinned, waggling her fingers. 

"Sure."

Lena forgot the coat.

* * *

Lena wasn't sure what she was expecting when Kara yanked open the door. Not dressed in fluffy pyjamas, hair piled on top of her head with a tub of ice cream in one hand and a romcom blaring from the TV in the background. Lena took it all in before she really zoned in on Kara's face, a blotchy face from crying that Lena prayed to God was due to the movie and not Lena herself. 

Kara just stared at her, eyebrows hitting her hairline in abject question, and Lena briefly found herself lost for words before everything rushed out all at once. 

"I had to see you."

Kara braced her shoulder against the doorframe, folding her arms, hugging the container of ice-cream like a security blanket.

"Why?"

Lena bit her inner cheek, hard enough to draw blood. Losing herself in Kara's stare for a heartbeat before she smiled without fear. 

"Because it relaxes me," she admitted excitedly because that in itself was the best news in the world. "Being around you, it's warm. I've known three people in my entire life that made me feel that way. I married one, the second one was her daughter, and now you."

Lena's smile widened, feeling blooming in her chest like mad fire. She wanted to dance to and sing and shout it out loud, but she supposed she'd have to settle with trying to get Kara to understand. 

"You've got to chase that feeling when you find it, you know. Chase it. Care for it. Because if you're lucky, and I've been so fucking lucky, you're that feeling for the other person too." 

Lena looked down, her eyes prickling with tears before she looked back up.

"I want to be that feeling for you," she whispered defiantly. "I'm hoping I am already. You make me want to be a better person. You're everything I need and want, and it's not because I think you're perfect."

Kara watched her silently, her face a war of emotions that Lena couldn't read.

"I want to know all about your imperfections," Lena gentled, trying to memorise every expression Kara made anyway. "All the things that make you who are. And I want you to learn all about the shit that makes me who I am. Little things, stuff I do out of habit. I want to let you into my weird little world because I think that you're the most amazing woman alive."

Kara's mouth gapped slightly.

"Lena-"

"I mean, it doesn't have to be that complicated, does it?" Lena interrupted, desperate to finish and unable to put a lid on all she was feeling now. "You make me feel good. Like when I'm with you, I feel like I'm better, inside myself. And I know that you think that's not a good thing because when I'm not with you, I feel less than, but the thing is, shouldn't you feel less happy when a bit of what makes you that way isn't with you? When you're not with the person you love?" 

Kara's eyes widened before Lena even caught up to what she had said out loud.

"That bit of your heart that's just, outside of yourself and it's with that other person all the time," Lena explained, the words tumbling out in a mad rush of air and relief. "And I know you think I'm not ready yet, but I am. Ready for you. Most people are fucked up, but life's… back to normal for them. For a really long time, life wasn't going to be anything resembling _my_ normal." 

Lena's fingers twitched, and she had to resist the urge to touch Kara. To hold her. Feel her skin on her hands.

"But when I see you, it's great. I get this lovely feeling. And I'm so much better then I was. I can't promise that I won't be sad, but I'm better then I was. You've spent a long time getting to know the part of me that wasn't available, so I was wondering if I hadn't screwed it up too bad if you'd be interested in getting to know the part of me that is." 

Lena's nerves never felt tighter, like she was a teenager asking out her first crush, but she was so glad that she said it. 

"I mean, we've skipped through the bad stuff, got the baggage out in the open," Lena felt like she couldn't stop now.

This must be what Kara felt like every time one of her run-on sentences really got away from her.

"Both in therapy," she rambled, injecting cheer in her voice. "So that's like insurance. I'd really like to hear more of your stories. Learn whatever the hell you were on about with the pineapple." 

It didn't get a smile, but Lena demanded from herself to believe there was a spark in Kara's eyes. 

"I'd just like to spend more time with you, not swaddled in your grief and mine, none of it because you're worth it, and I think I'm worth it too," she finished, shuffling half a step forward, still not crossing the threshold. 

"So, what do you think? Want to maybe get a meal?"

Finally done, Lena's heart seemed to be the loudest sound left. She knew that Kara could probably hear it pounding in her chest. She felt bright, hopeful and nervous, but she'd said it. It was out there. Between them. 

Sitting. 

Not being answered for what felt like a ridiculously long time while Kara just stared at her, seemingly decided for the first time in her entire life not to speak. 

Then, the blue eyes blinked, her arms unfolded, and her spine straightened. With a determined gesture, Kara placed the tub she was holding down on the small table beside the door, then turned to look down at Lena with fierce intensity. Lena's breath caught, startling more aware then ever how much taller Kara was than her. And, blotchy face and all, was absolutely phenomenal to look at. Like she was carved from a statue dedicated to the sun itself. 

"Can I just do this one thing first?" Kara husked, leaning in ever so slightly.

"Yeah," Lena breathed permission. "Alright."

Then Kara was kissing her, and everything seemed to make sense. The two of them and both their lives and whether it was all destiny or chance. She tasted like starlight and ice cream, and the fresh sap on their tree and Lena loved it. She loved the way her body melted into Kara's. The way their lips fitted like two pieces of a whole. The way that one of Kara's hands cupped her cheek and traced her jawline. The way the other reached up to her hair. The way Lena relented when she let her play with it and held her tighter and tighter against her. When she finally broke away from her, after what seemed like an age, she looked at Lena with wonder and acceptance.

God, her skin _burned_ on Lena's. 

She was so _warm_.

"I love you too," Kara quieted with a smile, so close Lena could see the shadows cast by her eyelashes. "And I'll go out with you. For food."

Lena had no idea why she felt surprised, considering the kiss they'd just had, but surprised she was. Then elated.

"You sure?" The smile on her face growing.

Kara grinned in return, looking annoyingly smug and self-satisfied.

"Yeah."

Lena wrapped her arms around Kara and pulled her close, holding her tight and melting her that same delicious warmth. The heaviness in her stomach fluttered at the feeling of her body pressed against Kara's now. She sunk into it, appreciative of just being held and the smell of Kara. Cotton candy and folded sunlight. Human and alien all at once. No future felt bleak in the space of her arms, holding her just as tightly, just as safely as she ever could have predicted or hoped. Pulling away, far too soon in her own opinion, Lena caught a flash of colour out of the corner of her eye. A vase of flowers sitting on the dining room table. Delicate and white, with yellow centres.

"Are those… plumerias?"

Kara glanced in their direction before nodding and turning back.

"Yeah," she answered. "I love flowers."

Lena's throat tightened, something catching, a stone in her heart settling before, like a leaf in a breeze, it blew away. 

"So do I."

Kara's smile widened and, like a butterfly, she glided over the table, plucked one of the flowers from its place before drifting back towards Lena and placing it delicately in her hand. 

New life indeed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that's that. We don't pick who we fall in love with, and it never happens like it should. Life is pain, but it's also love and joy and new chances and a million moments layered together. You're never really alone. 
> 
> Let me know what you thought in the comments! Love to hear the thoughts and feelings :D


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